Why do some people sleepwalk?

I just found this short-but-sweet explanation for why sleepwalking occurs by neurologist Antonio Oliviero. It appears in this month’s Scientific American Mind:

People can perform a variety of activities while asleep, from simply sitting up in bed to more complex behavior such as housecleaning or driving a car. Individuals in this trancelike state are difficult to rouse, and if awoken they are often confused and unaware of the events that have taken place. Sleepwalking most often occurs during childhood, perhaps because children spend more time in the “deep sleep” phase of slumber. Physical activity only happens during the non–rapid eye movement (NREM) cycle of deep sleep, which precedes the dreaming state of REM sleep.

Recently my team proposed a possible physiological mechanism underlying sleepwalking. During normal sleep the chemical messenger gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) acts as an inhibitor that stifles the activity of the brain’s motor system. In children the neurons that release this neurotransmitter are still developing and have not yet fully established a network of connections to keep motor activity under control. As a result, many kids have insufficient amounts of GABA, leaving their motor neurons capable of commanding the body to move even during sleep. In some, this inhibitory system may remain underdeveloped—or be rendered less effective by environmental factors—and sleepwalking can persist into adulthood.

As a bonus, the page also has an explanation of why we experience the painful ‘brain freeze’ sensation when we eat ice cream too quickly.

UPDATE: Thanks to Danielle for sending this fascinating snippet:

I used to have a VERY SEVERE sleepwalking problem. This past summer, I researched the use of GABA for mild anxiety. Although there was a great deal of question over whether it could cross the blood-brain barrier, I thought it was worth a try. It didn’t work for anxiety at all – but I was surprised to notice that it cured my sleepwalking, which was completely unexpected! Now that I know more about the connection between GABA, slow-wave sleep, & sleepwalking, it makes sense. I think there may be real treatment or research potential there, but I have no idea to whom I should report this. Maybe you can do something with it?

Link to SciAmMind sleepwalking and brain freeze explanations.

The Lives They Left Behind

PsychCentral has alerted me to a wonderful online exhibit based on the lives of several psychiatric patients whose belongings were found in suitcases in an old asylum attic years after they had passed away.

All the individuals were patients at the Willard Asylum, some for as long as 62 years.

Unfortunately, the site is a bit over-Flashed which means it’s not the most intuitive to navigate, but it’s worth grappling with the menus at the bottom of the screen as the stories are incredibly touching.

The photo on the right is of ‘Frank’:

On June 7, 1945, Mr. Frank #27967 went into the Virginia Restaurant on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and was served a meal on a broken plate. He became upset and caused a disruption outside the restaurant, yelling and kicking garbage cans. The police were called, and, instead of arresting him, brought him to the psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital. From there, he was transferred to Brooklyn State Hospital, and on April 9, 1946, he was admitted to Willard, one of a growing number of African American patients transferred to Willard from New York City in the 40s, due to over-crowding…

Mr. Frank # 27967 never escaped the consequences of that day outside the restaurant in 1945. In 1949, he was transferred from Willard to the Veterans Administration hospital in Canandaigua, NY, and in 1954 to the VA hospital in Pittsburgh. He died there 30 years later, having spent more than half his life in an institution.

The site also has a great deal of information about the hospital itself, audio recordings of memories of the institution and more information about the book and touring exhibition which is on the road right now.

In fact, it’s currently on show at the Cayuga Museum of History and Art in Auburn, New York.

Link to The Lives They Left Behind online exhibit.

Where angels no longer fear to tread

The Economist has an article which serves as an interesting summary of some of the recent work on the psychology and neuroscience of religious belief.

It’s a little bit clumsy in places. For example, it summarises some of the work on the role of the temporal lobes as saying that “religious visions are the result of epileptic seizures that affect this part of the brain”.

Certainly, temporal lobe seizures are associated with religious experiences. A recent review reported that about 0.5% to 3% of people with the condition experience them.

But this work suggests that this is only one factor and actually minor functional changes are probably more important in the general population [pdf].

It’s also important to note that this sort of neuroscience research typically looks at beliefs and experiences concerning the ‘supernatural’ elements of religion.

However, the Economist article also discusses some recent psychological research looking at the influence of religion on social reasoning and touches on the possible evolutionary explanations for the widespread and persistent nature of religious ideas.

Link to Economist article ‘Where angels no longer fear to tread’.

Common scents and the psychology of smell

Nerve has a brief but interesting interview with psychologist Rachel Herz who talks about her research on the sense of smell and how it can influence our mind and behaviour.

I’ve not encountered Herz’s work before but it turns out she’s done a great deal of scientific research on the psychology and neuroscience of smell and has just written a book, The Scent of Desire, which seems to present the science of smell in an accessible format.

The interview contains a number of gems, but this particularly caught my eye:

Why do we grow accustomed to odors, but not to something like sound? In other words, why is the stench of garbage outside my apartment nowhere near as distracting as the drilling?

When we experience olfactory adaptation, the receptor literally stops responding to a chemical in the air after about twenty minutes. We adapt to all the sensations that are out there, but when the drilling starts and stops, your attention focuses on it and you’re irritated.

Smell is a fascinating area, perhaps because it is relatively unstudied (especially compared to vision).

We previously covered an interesting review article that talked about the fact that the brain has two smell networks – something that came us a complete surprise to me.

Link to Nerve interview with Rachel Herz.
Link to more info on The Scent of Desire book.

Seduction of the Innocent and the myth of Wertham

The New Yorker has a wonderful article on the famous American crackdown on horror comics in the 1950s, a campaign sparked by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham.

Wertham wrote the influential book, Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed that the comics of the time caused juvenile delinquency.

He listed themes that supposedly ran through various popular story lines, highlighting homosexual themes (Batman and Robin), bondage (Wonder Woman) and numerous examples of what he considered to be extreme violence.

It became a best-seller and eventually led to a Congressional inquiry into the morality and effect of comic book industry on young people.

Fearing state censorship, the comics book industry imposed their own code which, for years afterwards, virtually eliminated depictions of violence, gore, most supernatural themes, or anything that might be considered to hint at sexuality.

As a side-effect, it did lead to some curious titles that were deliberately intended to be more ‘wholesome’. As we discussed previously on Mind Hacks, one of these was the ‘Psychoanalysis’ series of comics.

The New Yorker article is so interesting because it looks at a new book which suggests that Wertham was not some sort of crazed censorship-fiend, as he’s sometimes depicted, and notes that he was actually against the subsequent censorship of comics.

Despite his concerns about delinquency and homosexuality, which seem a little odd in modern light, he had other more laudable aims which seem equally as relevant today and may have been hijacked by others:

He was against the code. He did not want to censor comic books, only to restrict their sale so that kids could not buy them without a parent present. He wanted to give them the equivalent of an R rating. Bart Beaty’s “Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture” ($22, paper; University Press of Mississippi) makes a strong case for the revisionist position. As Beaty points out, Wertham was not a philistine; he was a progressive intellectual. His Harlem clinic was named for Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law. He collected modern art, helped produce an anthology of modernist writers, and opposed censorship. He believed that people’s behavior was partly determined by their environment, in this respect dissenting from orthodox Freudianism, and some of his work, on the psychological effects of segregation on African-Americans, was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.

Wertham thought that representations make a difference—that how people see themselves and others reflected in the media affects the way they think and behave. As Beaty says, racist (particularly concerning Asians) and sexist images and remarks can be found on almost every page of crime and horror comics. What especially strikes a reader today is the fantastic proliferation of images of violence against women, almost always depicted in highly sexualized forms. If one believes that pervasive negative images of black people are harmful, why would one not believe the same thing about images of men beating, torturing, and killing women?

Interestingly, Wertham was not the only mind doctor involved in comics.

Psychologist William Moulton Marston was the creator of Wonder Woman and a lot of his personal and scientific interests appear in the stories.

He lived in a polyamorous relationship with two women (one, Elizabeth Marston, a noted psychologist herself) and was particularly interested in using blood pressure as part of lie detection technology (his ideas are still used in the polygraph test today).

Consequently, William and Elizabeth created Wonder Woman to be a strong, liberated female character who had a Lasso of Truth which would wrap itself around villains and prevent them from lying.

 
Link to New Yorker article ‘The Horror’ (via BB).
Link to info on book ‘Fredric Wertham And The Critique Of Mass Culture’.

Little known, and even less forgiven

The picture is of the memorial to Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a 17th century treatise on depression and still one of the greatest books in the history of medicine.

It is built into one of the pillars in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as he was both a vicar in the city and one of the governors of Christ Church college.

While Burton demonstrated his remarkable scholarship in the book, he had more than simply an academic interest in the subject matter.

He suffered severe depression during his life and admitted in the preface to the book (writing under the pen name Democritus Junior), that it served to keep his spirits up by keeping him busy.

His final piece of advice to sufferers of melancholy was “be not solitary, be not idle”, which holds equally well today as it did in 1621.

The book was a huge success and was highly regarded among Burton’s peers, but he was obviously down on himself until the end, as his monument contains a curious Latin epitaph which he wrote himself. It reads:

Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus,
Hic jacet Democritus junior
Cui vitam dedit et mortem
Melancholia.
Ob. 8 Id. Jan. A. C. MDCXXXIX.

It apparently translates to “Little known, and even less forgiven, here lies Democritus Junior, who gave his life and death to Melancholy. Died 9th January, 1639”.

The book is still widely read and can regularly be seen on the shelves of high-street book shops.

Link to Wikipedia article on Burton’s book with link to full-text.

Playing mind games, off the shelf

PhysOrg has a brief article on the various ‘mind reading’ headsets that are in the pipeline and could make it onto the gaming market this year.

The article mentions several systems that are apparently close to release and notes some of technology which is intended to allow ‘thought control’ of games:

Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel “biofeedback” games developed by its partners.

Several other companies Рincluding EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo Рare also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

The technology is based on medical technology that has been around for decades. Using a combination of EEGs (which reveal alpha waves that signify calmness), EMGs (which measure muscle movement), and ECGs and GSR (which measure heart rate and sweating), developers hope to create a picture of a player´s mental and physical state. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which monitors changes in blood oxygenation, could also be incorporated since it overcomes some of the interference problems with EEGs.

I’ll be intrigued to see how well they work, but I suspect they’ll be more of a novelty than a genuinely useful addition for avid gamers, at least at first.

This is largely because the main technology for reading brain activity is EEG.

Even with thousands of pounds worth of kit, neuroscientists get participants to do the same task over and over and then average the results to get a reliable waveform.

This is partly because this technology is a relatively crude measure of the total electrical activity that happens over a large area (so on any one occasion the wave will be influenced by a number of other brain functions going on at the same time), and partly because the electrical activity from something as small as the eye-blink muscles drowns out the signal from the brain.

It’s interesting that the article mentions near infrared spectroscopy as another possible way of reading brain function (as used by Natalie Portman).

This involves beaming near-infrared light into the head, where it penetrates the skull and gets absorbed by brain to differing degrees, depending on how much blood is in the area. The amount of light that bounces back can be used to infer blood saturation and, hence, brain activity.

However, changes in blood flow lag behind the activity of the neurons by up to 5 seconds (and interestingly, this varies as we age). This is because blood is ‘called in’ to replenish the local nutrients that are instantly available but in short supply.

Similarly, systems that measure skin conductance or heart rate (a proxy measure for arousal or stress) have a similar problem with lag.

So gamers wanting to control games at the ‘speed of thought’ are likely to be disappointed. EEG is too noisy, NIRS is too slow.

What the headsets might do well, however, is something quite different.

The MIT Affective Computing group have spent several years looking at how computers could present information differently depending on the emotional state of the user.

According to Jonathan Moreno’s book Mind Wars this is also something that the US Military has great interest in, and you can also see how it would enhance games.

The readings from the headset will probably do a better job of keeping track of the easier to measure and relatively slow moving responses like arousal and stress, and these could be used by game designers to enhance your experience (maybe to slow things down if you’re too stressed and under-performing to avoid frustration, or to pump-things up at tense moments).

One of the most interesting possibilities is what might happen when hackers got hold of the systems.

Suddenly, they’ll be thousands of people with standard kit for reading physiological responses and, to a certain extent, brain function.

As soon as someone finds a way to reliably read a novel type of brain function, even with this limited technology, everyone will be able to use it.

Furthermore, it might lead to some fascinating home cognitive neuroscience experiments and demonstrations. Imagine having a home NIRS system – rock on!

Link to PhysOrg article on ‘Mind Gaming’ (via 3QD).

Normality bites

BBC Radio 4 has just concluded another run of its fantastic series Am I Normal? which looks at the science of differences in our minds, brains and abilities.

The series has done a remarkably good job in exploring the psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience of common human concerns and how they differ across the population.

This stretches from distinct pathologies and medical disorders at one end, to normal variation at the other – although ‘normal variation’ itself contains a diverse array of differences.

The latest series looked at shyness and social phobia, dyslexia, maths and selective mathematical difficulties and, finally, insomnia and sleep.

Insomnia is particularly interesting because psychological concerns are known to play a huge role in maintaining the patterns of broken sleep and subsequent anxiety.

For example, a well-replicated finding is that people with insomnia vastly under-estimate the amount of sleep they get during the night, sometimes sleeping several more hours that they think they do (Tom discussed some of this research in on Mind Hacks back in 2004, and the full text of a recent scientific paper on the topic is available online as a pdf).

Evidence also suggests that worry feeds into this biased perception of sleep, and that there is also quite a discrepancy between how people with insomnia perceive the impairments they experience in their waking life, and what neuropsychological tests actually find.

This isn’t to suggest that people with insomnia are exaggerators (it’s worth noting that they do have genuine sleep difficulties), simply that one of the main difficulties is how they evaluate their sleep and its impact – which tends to prolong or make the problem worse.

This is why psychological and behavioural treatments (such as cognitive therapy or changing the environment or daily routines) are particularly effective in treating sleep difficulties.

Link to BBC Radio 4 Am I Normal? series (via BPSRD).

Defining brain death and the controversies of existence

The Boston Globe has an interesting article on the concept of ‘brain death’. The criteria for brain death are being contested and it’s become a hot issue, partly because the US allows organs from consenting donors to be removed when brain death has been diagnosed.

The ‘dead donor rule’ stipulates that it’s only possible to remove organs in cases where a person has died, and this can either be after cardiac death, where the heart and lungs stop functioning, or after brain death, where the brain suffers irreversible damage which causes coma where the patient is kept alive solely by life support.

Most organs donated from the deceased come from people who have been diagnosed as brain dead. Organs remain viable for only about an hour or two after a person’s last heartbeat. Brain dead patients are ideal candidates for organ donation, then, because they are kept on ventilators, which means their heart and lungs continue to work, ensuring that a steady flow of oxygen-rich blood keeps their organs healthy. Surgeons remove the donor’s organs, then shut off the ventilator. The patient’s heart eventually stops.

Yet a small but vocal minority in the medical community has always insisted that some brain dead patients may not be dead. For instance, one study documented some kind of brain activity in up to 20 percent of people declared brain dead, suggesting to some critics that doctors sometimes misdiagnose the condition. Although some neurologists contend the claim, University of Wisconsin medical ethicist Dr. Norman Fost points to research showing that many “brain dead” patients have a functioning hypothalamus, a structure at the base of the brain that governs certain bodily functions, such as blood pressure and appetite.

It’s an challenging that speaks directly to our idea of what divides life and death. There is no question that any of the patients will recover, regardless of any residual activity detected in their brain.

But it prompts the question of what sort of brain activity we consider human enough to constitute life.

Of course, the issue is compounded by the importance of life-saving organ donation operations, for which suitable organs are almost always in short-supply.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘Fatal flaw’.

Pavlov: the name that rings a bell

Mental Floss, an emporium of thought-themed merchandise, do this witty Pavlov t-shirt in either a long or short-sleeved version.

Actually, they do quite a few psychology themed t-shirts although they have a distinctly early 19th century feel to them.

For those still on a behaviourist tip, Advances in the History of Psychology have an interesting piece on common errors in psychology textbooks, with one about an oft-repeated legend concerning the bearded Russian dog harasser:

…a wide array of textbooks seem to repeat a version of the story of Pavlov‚Äôs mugging in which he laid his wallet beside him on a seat at New York‚Äôs Grand Central Station and, upon discovering it missing after an extended intellectual reverie, philosophically mused ‚Äúone must not put temptation in the way of the needy.‚Äù

In fact, according to the contemporary New York Times account of the event, Pavlov and his son were confronted by a three men after having boarded a train and had their money forcibly taken from them.

Link to Mental Floss t-shirts.

2008-03-21 Spike activity

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

Medication is the least effective way of treating children with conduct problems, according to a recent review.

Truth serum art chaos! The Arts Catalyst has a secret psychology art-science project you can participate in on March 29th in Liverpool.

The New York Times has a rather timely election themed article on the psychology of rumours.

“You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another imaging paper again…” Evidence we are helpless to resist (the colours! the colours!) as Mixing Memory discusses a recent brain imaging study on the influence of language on colour perception.

Child-like intelligence created in Second Life. Surely this isn’t news?

Treatment Online examines a study which has found differences in a gene linked to neural connectivity in people with autism spectrum diagnoses.

The New York Times has an article on the popularity of sewing wild oats throughout the animal kingdom.

The key Freudian concept of transference captured in the lab, and reported by Cognitive Daily. See an earlier Mind Hacks post for more on the science of transference.

The Guardian reports that the Pentagon delayed mild brain injury screening in an attempt to prevent medicalisation of psychogenic problems.

<a href="Tiredness 'raises sleepwalk risk'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7300527.stm”>Sleepwalking is more likely to occur when people are recovering from sleep deprivation, reports BBC News.

As a nice complement to our recent post on authenticity, Psychology Today’s Matthew Hutson discusses the psychology of authenticity in the art world.

Is someone at New Scientist trying to win a bet over how many times they can get the word ‘telepathy’ into print? This time an article about a possible US military ‘telepathic’ ray gun‘ that has nothing to do with telepathy. Sadly.

Imminent gnome attack! Wired report on how World of Warcraft could be used to study terror tactics.

Channel N has a remarkably well-explained video introduction to body dysmorphic disorder.

It is better to give than receive. At least in terms of your happiness, reports Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Better living through reckless self-experimentation

Scientific American have just concluded its series on scientists who have experimented on themselves in an effort to better understand the mind, brain and body.

The first piece is about Kevin ‘Captain Cyborg’ Warwick, who seems mainly to have been experimenting with the media rather than himself.

I’ve always considered him the poor man’s Stelarc to be honest, but then again, Stelarc hasn’t had a distinguished research career in robotics so swings and roundabouts I guess.

A further story discusses Olivier Ameisen, a cardiologist who became alcoholic and treated himself with baclofen, a drug then untested for the condition.

There’s a couple of people who experimented on their children, which doesn’t really count as self-experimentation in my book, but they make for good reads nonetheless.

One covers Deb Roy’s recording of the entire first two years of his child’s vocalisations and speech to help understand how language develops.

The other describes Jay Giedd’s project to brain scan his daughter every three months from the age of four upwards. Interestingly, it got stopped by the ethics committee because she might feel pressured to take part. Surely bribery by Pokemon cards would have solved that problem?

While there are several other scientists discussed, the only other one of psychological interest in the legendary Alexander Shulgin who has spent most of his life synthesising new hallucinogenic drugs and trying them on himself. He’s now 83. There’s a moral in that story somewhere.

Link to SciAm’s self-experimenters series.

Will Working Mothers‚Äô Brains Explode?

A new journal, Neuroethics, has just launched and among the freely available articles is an engaging piece on ‘neurosexism’, the increasing trend to portray sex differences as ‘hard wired’ into the brain.

The piece is by psychologist Cordelia Fine who argues that some recent popular science books and articles are simply restating old stereotypes but making them sound more modern with an appeal to neuroscience.

Neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine’s book The Female Brain comes in for particular criticism, as it has in the scientific literature. But despite the fact it seems to play fast and loose with the scientific evidence, it has become an international best-seller.

Then, too, with the buzz-phrase ‘hard-wiring’ comes an extraordinary insistence on locating social pressures in the brain. In The Female Brain, for example, the working mother learns that she is struggling against “the natural wiring of our female brains and biological reality” (p. 161). According to Brizendine, combining motherhood with career gives rise to a neurological “tug-of-war because of overloaded brain circuits” (p. 160). Career circuits and maternal circuits battle it out, leading to “increased stress, increased anxiety, and reduced brainpower for the mother’s work and her children.” (p. 112).

But Brizendine promises her female readers that “understanding our innate biology empowers us to better plan our future.” (p. 159). It may startle some readers to learn that family friendly workplace policies are not the solution to reduced maternal stress and anxiety, and that fathers who do the kindergarten pick-ups, pack the lunch-boxes, stay home when the kids are sick, get up in the night when the baby wakes up, and buy the birthday presents and ring the paediatrician in their lunch hour are not the obvious solution to enhanced maternal ‘brainpower’.

No, it is an appreciation of female brain wiring that will see the working mother through the hard times. (Predictably, Brizendine never even hints that the over-wired working mother consider the simplest antidote to the ill-effects of going against her ‘natural wiring’: namely, giving her partner a giant kick up the neurological backside.)

Fine’s argument is not that that sex differences don’t exist in the mind and brain. Indeed, there are numerous scientific studies which have reported these.

The problem is that they are often portrayed in the popular literature as being ‘hard wired’ – an ugly analogy taken from computers that suggests that the difference is an innate and permanent feature.

Apart from ignoring the fact sex differences are typically only stable at the group level (meaning that this difference is not significant in any single male-female comparison) most of these claims about ‘hard wiring’ are not based on evidence about the innateness of the difference.

Actually, I’ve never been clear what ‘hard-wired’ is supposed to mean. Even if we presume that a particular behaviour or feature is coded in the DNA, the brain develops only through interaction with its environment – be this after birth, or in the womb.

In other words, most claims about a human ability being ‘hard wired’ ignore the history of how these develop through our lives.

The rest of the first issue of Neuroethics also looks fascinating, with article on neuroenhancement of love and lust, nanotech, neuroimaging and understanding others’ mind, to name but a few.

pdf or web version of Fine’s article ‘Will Working Mothers‚Äô Brains Explode?’.
Link to Neuroethics 1st issue table of contents (via Neurophilosophy).

The northern lights of neural stem cells

The beautiful image on the right is a collection of neural stem cells stained with fluorescent die, taken from the finalists of the Wellcome Image Awards.

A wonderful image of the bacteria that cause a type of meningitis is another brain-related image in the finalists’ gallery.

There are plenty more images of course, but don’t miss the audio interviews that accompany each image where the scientist discusses their work.

All of the pictures are quite stunning so well worth a look.

Link to 2008 Wellcome Image Awards gallery.

Internet addiction nonsense hits the AJP

While we’ve got used to ‘internet addiction’ popping up in the media from time to time, it has inexplicably been the subject of an editorial in this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry arguing it should be included in the DSM-IV – the next version of the diagnostic manual for psychiatry.

The editorial suggests that we should make ‘internet addiction’ a serious public health issue despite the fact that no-one yet has suggested anything that uniquely distinguishes it from its use as a tool or a source of entertainment.

For example, here are the components that the author, psychiatrist Jerald Block, cites as evidence that someone can become addicted to the internet:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

Apart from the fact that these and most other supposed criteria make no distinction between using the internet and what the person is using the internet for, it’s easy to see that they don’t describe anything unique to the net.

For example, here are my criteria for ‘sports team addiction’:

1) excessive time following games, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when team news or matches are inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better match viewing equipment, more news, or more hours of team-related activity, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

As more people in the world follow sports teams than have access to the internet, surely this is the more serious problem, especially considering the high levels of violence and alcohol abuse associated with this tragic affliction.

You may, of course, substitute whatever interest you want into the criteria to capture people who are the most motivated to pursue their favourite interest, or who are workaholics who rely on the technology (if you want a retro version, substitute the ‘postal system’ for the internet for a 1908 style communication addiction).

Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with ‘internet addiction’ have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.

In fact, ‘internet addiction’, however it is defined, is associated with depression and anxiety but no-one has ever found this to be a causal connection.

Recent research shows that shy or depressed people use the internet excessively to (surprise, surprise) meet people and manage their shyness.

And in fact, as I mentioned in an earlier article, one of the only longitudinal studies [pdf] on the general population found that internet use is generally associated with positive effects on communication, social involvement, and well-being, although interestingly, those who were already introverts show increased withdrawal.

In other words, the internet is a communication tool and people use it manage their emotional states, like they do with any other technology.

Of course there are some people who are depressed and anxious who use the internet (or follow sports teams, or read books, or watch TV…) to excess, but why we have to describe this as an addiction still completely baffles me.

Link to AJP editorial. Don’t click! You’re feeding your addiction!
Link to previous post ‘Why there is no such thing as internet addiction’.

Head transplants and Szymborska’s Experiment

The Nobel prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska wrote one of her most striking poems about a morbid experiment where a dog’s head was cut from its body but kept alive by a blood-pumping machine.

The poem serves as a commentary on happiness and anxiety about the purpose of existence, but what many people don’t know is that the experiment was genuinely completed, and the black and white film that the poem is based on can be viewed online.

The experiment was executed by Russian scientists and anticipated later work by neurosurgeon Robert White, who attempted transplant the heads of two monkeys, as can be seen in footage from the procedure.

While White thought of it as a possible precursor to human head transplantation, the scientific community reacted with outrage and these days it’s generally thought of as a pretty appalling experiment that achieved virtually nothing of consequence.

Neuroscientist Steven Rose gives an interesting video commentary on the experiment, drawing from recent findings in ‘embodied cognition‘ which have suggested that the brain cannot be meaningfully switched because so much of our experience of our minds relies on the body in which it has developed and is embedded.

I’ve also included Szymborska’s poem below the fold if you want to see her literary reflection on watching the original Russian film.

Link to Soviet film on separated dog head.
Link to footage of White’s monkey head transplant film.
Link to video with reaction and commentary to White’s experiments.

 

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