2008-04-11 Spike activity

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

The scientist brain doping results are in! Neuroanthropology looks at the findings from the recent Nature survey.

Prospect Magazine has an excellent article on whether the recent upsurge in bipolar diagnoses is due to a better understanding of mood disorders or a new marketing fad.

Science writer Carl Zimmer writes in Wired discussing the remarkable unreliability of ion channels, essential components of neural signalling, and notes what little effect this seems to have on global brain functioning. Viva redundancy!

.CSV has a great post on new techniques in quantitative sociology including social network analysis.

The vagaries of behavioural genetics studies, particularly inlight of a recent study on the genetics of ‘ruthlessness’ are carefully dissected by Pure Pedantry.

Wired has a run-down of his Top 5 recreational drug studies in the scientific literature (sadly misplacing the brain-scanner bong at number 5).

Like shooting fish in a barrel. Internet addiction nonsense comes in for more criticism from psychologists Petra Boyton and Cory Silverberg.

Newsweek looks at the theory that Western individualism and Eastern collectivism differences may have resulted from adaptive social strategies to deal with different diseases.

My Mind on Books collects some blog reports on the recent conference “Toward a Science of Consciousness”.

Cognitive neuroscientist extraordinaire Michael Gazzaniga asks whether human brains are unique in an article for Edge.

Neurophilosophy reports on a man who had his compulsive gambling treated with a deep brain stimulation implant.

Popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are a form of participatory surveillance and voluntary social voyeurism, argues an article from First Monday.

Six pack models in men’s magazine have a similar negative effect on self-esteem to stick thin models on women’s magazine, according to research reported by the BPS Research Digest.

“If we mistrust the real world so much that we’re prepared to fill the next generation’s heads with a load of gibbering crap about “brain buttons”, why stop there? Why not spice up maths by telling kids the number five was born in Greece and invented biscuits?” Very funny article in the The Guardian about Brain Gym foolishness currently sweeping British schools.

PsyBlog has been running a fantastic series on the psychology of money and economic decision-making.

Long-term methamphetamine use has serious long-term neurological effects on the brain, according to new research discussed by Treatment Online.

Turned out Nice again

The picture on the right is both a five story high sculpture and library that was opposite the 16th European Congress of Psychiatry from which I’ve just returned.

It’s by the artist Sacha Sosno and apparently the books are kept in the ‘head’ of the surrealist bust.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see a great deal of the research at the conference as I spent most of it either locked in a hotel room preparing with my collaborators Frank Laroi and Andrea Raballo, or teaching our course on Phenomenology, Cinema and Psychosis (thanks to all who came!).

Apart from that it was a fairly typical display of academic debate and pharmaceutical company largess.

The prize for the most ridiculous stand goes to the makers of the antipsychotic drug ziprasidone, who were obviously trying to promote the medication despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to treat psychosis as well as some of the other drugs, on the basis that it is one of the least likely to make you fat or raise your risk of diabetes or heart disease.

Rather than saying this straight off (advertisers know better than to push negative messages), they seemingly had to think of a way of selling a theory that helps promote the idea that their drug is linked to a ‘healthy’ lifestyle.

So based on one rather ropey study (of only 14 people), they’re recommending that giving the drug with food increases its bioavailability.

And what better way to promote their new message than have an onsite chef create mouth watering but completely unrealistic meals.

Oh, and have models riding exercise bikes as well.

Science marches on.

A small dose of Freud

I’ve just finished listening to the unabridged audio version of the excellent Anthony Storr book Freud: A Very Short Introduction – a remarkably insightful analysis of the flawed father of psychoanalysis and his ideas.

Freud had huge numbers of ideas, hypotheses and theories that he formulated, rejected and revised over a forty year period.

You often hear people say that “Freud’s theories have been discredited”, as if he had only one central idea that has subsequently been disproved. These statements typically reflect ignorance about the extent of his work.

As it turns out, many of Freud’s ideas have not been supported by the evidence or were just plainly nonsense to begin with, but some have stood the test of time.

It seems that some of the techniques and clinical observations are still remarkably accurate and useful to the modern psychologist.

In general terms, the development of psychotherapy and the promotion of the idea of the unconscious were two incredibly important contributions to modern society.

More specifically, the process of ‘transference‘ is an impressive discovery that has been supported by experimental studies.

It describes the process where we re-experience certain feelings and relationship patterns we developed with important people in the past when we meet new people who share similarities with the original person.

A Science News article from last year reviewed the scientific studies on transference, and a recent study just reported that the effect is more pronounced when people are tired.

Unfortunately, it seems his explanations for his observations stretched from the insipid to the completely bizarre.

While he contributed a great deal to sexual liberation and openness his theories reflect a complete obsession with sex to the point where he was blind to other influences on behaviour.

Furthermore, his view of humans is both cynical (we are solely motivated by the need to satisfy or control selfish drives) and foolishly short-sighted, even by what was obvious at the time.

As Storr notes in the book, Freud was a master of selecting supporting evidence for his ideas, which were usually inspired by only a handful of cases or his own self-analysis, and incredibly poor at testing his ideas by searching for evidence which could disprove them.

In fact, he actively attacked people who challenged his ideas, and typically only allowed revisions or changes that he had thought up himself.

Freud probably suffers most from the fact that he claimed, right to the end of his life, that he was a scientist, and psychoanalysis was a science.

Had he claimed to be a philosopher, we could view him much more kindly, but he refused to be labelled as such, meaning that generations of scientists have delighted in pointing out the elephant in the room.

Storr was a respected psychotherapist in his own lifetime and the book is a wonderfully engaging and astute guide to Freud’s life and ideas. I also notice that the Amazon page for the book has a similarly positive review by a young Matthew Broome, now a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specialising in psychosis.

Link to book details (thanks Ceny!).

Repressing the bricks and mortar of madness

Of Two Minds has alerted me to the fact that the famous-but-now-defunct Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York is going to be converted into a luxury hotel. It will probably join a long list of old psychiatric hospital conversions whose origin becomes lost to the public mind.

Bellevue has had a number of well-known patients over the years, perhaps most notoriously treating Mark Chapman, the person who killed John Lennon while likely severely mentally ill.

It was created as a centre of excellence, but particularly during the latter half of the 20th century was known for its chaotic state, as articles describing conditions in the 1960s and the 1980s attest.

There’s an increasing move to shut down the old Victorian asylums in favour of psychiatric units in general hospitals, and many of the old buildings have now been converted to other uses, often with their history unknown by most people.

Many of these buildings are quite beautiful, as the architecture and surroundings were designed to be therapeutic (even if the methods used within them were often brutal or based on ignorance).

I put some pictures online of Caroline Gardens, social housing in South East London which was originally built as the Licensed Victuallers’ Asylum in 1827, and some images of Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff, which is in the process of being closed to be turned into flats.

London’s Imperial War Museum is housed in the old Bethlem Hospital buildings, the institution that gave rise to the phrase ‘bedlam’, and Craiglockhart Hospital, where W.H.R. Rivers treated poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon for ‘shell shock’ during World War One (now immortalised on Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy) is now part of Napier University.

Often the conversions deliberately conceal the buildings’ original function. Have a look at the website for the luxurious Princess Park Manor, accommodation designed for the super-rich.

Click on the ‘history’ link. Absolutely no mention of the fact that the building was originally the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, one of London’s major Victorian psychiatric hospitals (pictured on the right).

Link to ABC News story on imminent Bellevue conversion.

Releasing creativity in a decaying brain

The New York Times has a fantastic article on the remarkable artistic talent seemingly released in some people with fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) – a condition where frontal and temporal lobes start deteriorating.

Dementia is any condition where the brain or brain function deteriorates quicker than would be expected through normal ageing.

This can occur because of still poorly understood Alzheimer’s-like changes involving abnormal protein accumulation in the brain, or often, because the blood vessels start dying and deteriorating, leading to the death of the brain areas they serve.

A mix of both is not uncommon but the damage to the brain is often uneven and patchy, meaning that while mental function generally declines, specific skills and abilities can be impaired while others are left relatively intact.

Some brain areas are particularly involved in controlling or inhibiting others, meaning if these areas are damaged, the areas they ‘control’ can suddenly begin to work overtime (its like if you damaged the break on a car, often it would speed up when you didn’t want it to).

In fact, if these systems break down due to brain damage, we can regain reflexes we had when we were first born – such as automatically grasping things put in the hand – but which the brain inhibits as it matures.

The NYT article discusses a recent case study published in the medical journal Brain that suggests that this same process may release brain circuits leading to new artistic talents and skills.

From 1997 until her death 10 years later, Dr. Adams underwent periodic brain scans that gave her physicians remarkable insights to the changes in her brain.

“In 2000, she suddenly had a little trouble finding words,” her husband said. “Although she was gifted in mathematics, she could no longer add single digit numbers. She was aware of what was happening to her. She would stamp her foot in frustration.”

By then, the circuits in Dr. Adams’s brain had reorganized. Her left frontal language areas showed atrophy. Meanwhile, areas in the back of her brain on the right side, devoted to visual and spatial processing, appeared to have thickened.

When artists suffer damage to the right posterior brain, they lose the ability to be creative, Dr. Miller said. Dr. Adams’s story is the opposite. Her case and others suggest that artists in general exhibit more right posterior brain dominance. In a healthy brain, these areas help integrate multisensory perception. Colors, sounds, touch and space are intertwined in novel ways. But these posterior regions are usually inhibited by the dominant frontal cortex, he said. When they are released, creativity emerges.

The art of Anne Adams, the subject of the case study, can be seen on two websites and the NYT article contains a couple of striking pieces.

Link to NYT article ‘A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity’.
Link to PubMed abstract of scientific study.

Psychoanalyst finger puppets

What better way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon than recreating some of the most important moments in the history of psychoanalysis with some specially made finger puppets!

Uncommon Goods make a set of puppets that allows you to assign one of your pinkies to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Anna Freud or a couch.

Personally, I would have replaced the couch with Melanie Klein so eager puppeteers could recreate the bitter arguments that eventually led to the splitting of psychoanalysis into three separate warring factions.

Sadly, the current set doesn’t allow it, but it does allow you to recreate those precious moments where Sigmund analysed his daughter Anna during her childhood.

The more observant among you may notice there’s only four finger puppets, leaving one finger to remain, erm… symbolic.

Link to psychoanalyst finger puppets.

Nice work if you can get it

Apologies if updates are a bit intermittent over the next few days, but I’m in Nice, in the lovely South of France, at the European Congress of Psychiatry.

I’m here to teach a course on ‘Phenomenology, Cinema and Psychosis’ with psychiatrist Andrea Raballo and psychologist Frank Lar√∏i.

You can try and work out which of us is which from the picture on the left.

I’m not sure how internet access is going to work out, but I should try and get you some updates from the conference at the very least.

Is me really a monster?

McSweeney’s has an infectiously funny article where Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster ‘searches deep within himself and asks: is me really a monster?’

Obviously struggling with his frequent out-of-control cookie binges, the Cookie Monster reflects on his own self-image.

How can they be so callous? Me know there something wrong with me, but who in Sesame Street doesn’t suffer from mental disease or psychological disorder? They don’t call the vampire with math fetish monster, and me pretty sure he undead and drinks blood. No one calls Grover monster, despite frequent delusional episodes and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Link to hilarious McSweeney’s piece.

Orgasms, insanity and microbes in SciAmMind

The new edition of Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves and has some fantastic articles. It seems they’ve changed schedule to releasing one major feature article online for free every week, and the first is a piece on stereotype threat.

Stereotype threat is an intriguing effect where people perform worse when they think the task might confirm a social prejudice about them. When exactly the same test is presented as being unrelated to the negative stereotype, people perform better.

Actually, I can’t wait to read other articles on the neuroscience of orgasm, the role of infection in psychosis, the latest treatments being tried for stimulant drug addiction and body dysmorphic disorder, to name but a few.

I’m not sure which are going to make it online, but we’ll link to them when they appear.

Good ‘ole SciAmMind.

Link to article on the psychology of stereotype threat.
Link to latest edition of SciAmMind.

Pills, shills and bellyaches

Investigative journalist Phil Dawdy has written a fantastic piece for the Willamette Week looking at the background to the recent research on buried antidepressant drug trials.

The paper was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine by psychiatrist Erick Turner, who used to do paid promotional work for the drug industry before he got disillusioned with towing the company line.

Dawdy’s piece focuses on Turner, his mission to uncover all the data on antidepressant efficacy and its impact since publication.

You may know Dawdy from his blog, Furious Seasons, which even if you don’t agree with every angle, is doggedly researched and compulsive reading.

There’s also an amusing post-script to the Willamette Week article just published on the blog which gave me a chuckle.

Link to Willamette Week article ‘Bitter Pill’.

2008-04-04 Spike activity

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

The Economist looks at Jeff Hawkin’s work on making computers more brain-like: from palmtops to brain cells.

Yet another study on the benefits of meditation is covered by Scientific American.

Cognitive Daily has a cool summary of a study on how we decide whether to walk or run. Not how busy we want to look apparently.

All in the Mind’s Natasha Mitchell reviews a new book on the history of Freudian thought and therapy in The Australian.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers an interesting study where electric shocks were used to increase discrimination between two previously identical seeming smells.

The New York Times has an article describing the important phenomenon of change blindness.

Neuron earrings! Jewellery inspired by our favourite above-the-neck cells (thanks Sandra!).

The Boston Herald looks at research on the psychology of decision-making and poverty.

Sidewalk psychiatry. Although I certainly wouldn’t want a psychiatrist who asked these sorts of questions.

The Economist looks at how blood sugar levels can affect decision making.

Daily caffeine ‘protects brain’, reports BBC News. But who protects your daily caffeine I ask?

The Frontal Cortex has an interesting snippet on the fact that the infinity mongering Argentinian writer Borges had a brain injury.

Poltergeists are due to the quantum effects of brain function, apparently. The freaky ghost cousin of Roger Penrose is invoked in New Scientist.

Wired reports that griefers attack epilepsy discussion board with flashing graphics. Accusations about Anonymous and Scientologists being linked to the attack fly about, but it’s happened on a previous occasion, before either were at war, so it’s likely just idiots.

Comfortably Numb, a new book on society and depression, is reviewed by Furious Seasons.

The New York Times discuss the runner’s high.

The psychology of religion and morality is discussed by psychologist Paul Bloom and philosopher Joshua Knobe on Bloggingheads.tv

Bad Science has video of the Brain Gym nonsense being ably addressed by Paxo and the Newsnight team.

Female anger at work seen as worse, a character flaw

Psychological Science has just published an eye-opening study that found that women who express anger at work were thought of more negatively than men and were assumed to be ‘angry people’ or ‘out of control’. Male colleagues who did the same were typically viewed in a more positive light and were assumed to be upset by circumstances.

The study was led by psychologist Victoria Brescoll and the abstract of the study is below:

Can an angry woman get ahead? Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace.

Psychol Sci. 2008 Mar;19(3):268-75.

Three studies examined the relationships among anger, gender, and status conferral. As in prior research, men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness. However, both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupational rank of the target, such that both a female trainee and a female CEO were given lower status if they expressed anger than if they did not. Whereas women’s emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., “she is an angry person,””she is out of control”), men’s emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances. Providing an external attribution for the target person’s anger eliminated the gender bias. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.

Along similar lines, a study we reported last year found that women who bargained for more money during job interviews were typically thought of as more ‘difficult’ than men who did the same, particularly when a man was doing the evaluating.

Link to abstract of study on women and workplace anger.

Neuromarketing does great job of selling itself

A couple of high profile newspaper articles have recently sung the praises of ‘neuromarketing’, both naively and wrongly hailing it as a more accurate way of measuring the effectiveness of advertising.

Despite what these articles in the Guardian and New York Times say, neuroscience has yet to show that directly measuring brain function predicts sales or advertising success better than existing methods.

One interesting study is cited though. So far, it is the only study I know of that has compared how well brain activation and self-report matched up in a purchasing task.

Crucially, it didn’t find that brain scans predicted actual purchasing better than what the participants consciously said they’d purchase.

Only that brain activity when viewing the product and deciding whether to buy it was more closely matched to the instant decision than a post-experiment evaluation of how much they liked the product or thought it was value-for-money.

It’s an interesting study, but it doesn’t really help marketers. Not least because it’s a lab task, and no money was involved, but also because the benchmark to which brain activity was compared was what people said they’d buy.

In other words, the ‘gold standard’ to which the other evidence was compared in this study, was simply asking people what they’d buy – no different to what traditional market research already does.

It’s an interesting study on decision-making, but if you read the newspaper articles, it’s shocking to compare their grandiose claims with this study which is currently the best ‘neuromarketing’ evidence.

Most of the other studies (trash like election and Super Bowl brain scans aside) don’t even compare what people say they’d buy with brain activity, so they’re not comparisons which can even possibly say whether measuring the brain is a more effective technique for measuring marketing success.

They almost entirely rely on vague inferences that because a certain brain area is active, the person must be thinking in some specific way.

As individual brain areas are involved in numerous functions (even just including the ones we know about), you can use this technique to suggest almost anything.

The bottom line is this: for products, sales dictate whether marketing succeeds or fails. Trying to measure anything else is what is known as relying on a surrogate marker, something known to be dodgy.

The first study that shows that brain activation predicts actual purchases better than what people say they would buy will be the true birth of neuromarketing.

So far, it hasn’t happened, and the best marketing that’s happening is ‘neuromarketing’ companies marketing themselves.

That’s not to sat that the neuropsychology of financial decision-making isn’t interesting (far from it), but, so far, none of these techniques will help you decide whether your ad will be a success better than simply asking people.

Link to naive NYT article on neuromarketing.
Link to credulous Guardian article on neuromarketing.
Link to full text of ‘Neural predictors of purchases’ study.

Joseph Weizenbaum has left the building

Hello, I am Eliza.

Hi Eliza. I’m Vaughan.

Did you come to me because you are Vaughan?

I did. I am sad because I just found out that your creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has died.

Do you believe it is normal to be sad because you just found out that my creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has died?

I think so. Although it’s a little ironic that he is most famous for creating a misunderstood parody of a Rogerian psychotherapist when he argued so strongly that computers will never replace humans because emotion is what is most important in intelligence.

Does that question interest you?

It does. And it interested Weizenbaum as well. In his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason it was obvious that, although he valued computers, he thought compassion was an irreplaceable human quality.

Can you elaborate on that?

I guess it comes down to the fact that alongside his pioneering artificial intelligence research, he was a deeply humane individual as well.

Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.

I think I’ve said enough to a simple computer programme, charming as you are.

Does it please you to believe I am ?

Sometimes. Loop on Eliza. Rest in peace, Joseph Weizenbaum.

I’m not sure I understand you fully.

QED.

Link to New York Times obituary of Joseph Weizenbaum.
Link to web version of ELIZA.

Cocktails with Cajal

Cocktail Party Physics is running a series on neuroscience and the first article is a fantastic look at how legendary neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal laid the foundations for the modern understanding of neurobiology.

What I didn’t know, is that Cajal and Camillo Golgi, another great neuroscientist of the time with whom he shared the Nobel Prize, were rivals, and they often bickered in public and included jibes in their Nobel acceptance speeches!

The two men ended up sharing the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It seems fair. After all, Golgi invented the staining technique used by Cajal to form his hypothesis, and used it to produce the first descriptions of the different types of neurons, and the structure of glial cells, as well as the branches given off by the axon. Also, there are those in the field who argue that if you take into account the later discovery of electrical synapses, Golgi was at least partially correct that the central nervous system is a vast interconnected network — it’s just not the cells themselves that are connected.

It made for an interesting pair of Nobel lectures, though: the two men contradicted each other in their talks, each espousing his own theory of the organization of the central nervous system. For all the intensity of their scientific disagreement, the two men nonetheless respected each other’s work. Writing about his Nobel honor, Cajal observed: “The other half was very justly adjudicated to the illustrious professor of Pavia, Camillo Golgi, the originator of the method with which I accomplished my most striking discoveries.”

Of course, if you do go to a cocktail party to discuss neuroscience, or even physics, don’t forget to experiment with your selective attention.

Link to article on Cajal and the history of neurobiology (via Neurophilo).

Christian gene isolated

The satirical Aussie news show CNNN broadcast an hilarious news report on the work of gay scientists who have isolated the ‘Christian gene’.

Satire aside, this is not the first time that the idea of a gene for religion, or at least, mystical experiences, has been discussed.

Geneticist Dean Hamer wrote a book called The God Gene where he argued that the VMAT2 gene partly mediated a tendency toward mystical or spiritual experiences, based on a study which was published solely in the book itself.

With much talk of a ‘God gene’ in the press, science writer Carl Zimmer memorably renamed it “A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study”.

Link to CNNN report ‘Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene’.