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.

 

Continue reading “Head transplants and Szymborska’s Experiment”

Kiddie psychopaths and the database nation

Gary Pugh, the director of forensic sciences for the British police has sparked controversy after he suggested that children as young as five who display ‘future offending traits’ should be placed on a DNA database so they are more likely to be picked up if they commit crime in the future.

Pugh is almost certainly talking about children who have what are known as ‘callous-unemotional’ traits, described somewhat less politically correctly as ‘kiddie psychopathy’.

These have indeed been found to weakly predict future antisocial behaviour, but the picture is more complex than it seems and, as we’ll see, they aren’t a good basis on which to base future crime fighting efforts.

Psychopathy describes a pattern of shallow emotion, low empathy and the lack of conscience for antisocial acts, with the ability to seem charming on the surface. Callous-unemotional traits describe something similar in children.

A recent study on the prevalence of these traits in children used a fairly typical definition:

1. Makes a good impression at first but people tend to see through him/her after they get to know him/her
2. Shallow or fast-changing emotions.
3. Too full of his/her own abilities.
4. Is not genuinely sorry if s/he has hurt someone or acted badly.
5. Can seem cold-blooded or callous.
6. Doesn’t keep promises.
7. Not genuine in his/her expression of emotions.

This traits have been found in much higher levels in children with conduct disorder. CD is a psychiatric diagnosis, but really just describes a pattern of quite severe antisocial behaviour.

These studies have also found that in children already displaying aggressive or antisocial behaviour, callous-unemotional traits are associated with more severe aggressive, antisocial behaviour in the future.

However, recent studies that looked at these traits in the general population found that these traits reliably, but only very weakly, predict antisocial behaviour during the following years

So, if you look at the population as a whole, you could say that these childhood traits are genuinely linked to later antisocial acts, but the overall difference between children with and without these characteristics is small.

In other words, if you put every child with these traits on a DNA database, you’re unlikely to see a significant increase in later crime detection as a result and you’ll have the DNA of a lot of children who will never get in trouble with the law.

Link to BBC News story ‘Police spokesman sparks DNA row’.

Encephalon 41 arrives

The 41st edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published online, and this time it’s ably hosted by Pure Pedantry.

A couple of my favourites include Providentia on one of A.R. Luria’s most fascinating cases and the PodBlack Blog on magical thinking in politicians.

There’s plenty more, so have a look through for some of the best mind and brain writing of the last fortnight.

Link to Encephalon 41.

Faking the biscuit

They say sincerity is everything, and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Nowhere is this more true than in marketing and Time magazine discusses the seemingly related concept of ‘synthetic authenticity’ – the feeling that a product is the ‘real deal’, which is supposedly going to be one of the big commercial trends in the near future.

And how does a cutting edge company make a product seem authentic? Well, it’s not really clear from the article, but it seems to involve some sort of emotional attachment to the product which prompts associations with a sense of community and trust.

Two hundred years ago, agrarian Americans decided whether to buy a hoe mainly on the basis of whether it was available and affordable. But in the past 20 years, a school of behavioral economists has emerged to point out the obvious: consumers with higher living standards often make stupid, irrational decisions. We don’t simply look at price and quality; we decide how we feel about a refrigerator or even a pair of socks before we buy.

Authenticity is a way of understanding this concept… Gilmore and Pine give a name to this ephemeral dimension of consumer behavior: in addition to the established dimensions of availability, price and quality, we are buying according to authenticity.

In some instances, it seems to be a way of making the commercial relationship between buyer and seller seems less like a commercial relationship and more of an implicit partnership of friends.

In others, it seems to rely on the idea that the consumer is accessing some sort of underlying ‘true’ experience that cannot be captured by modern technology.

The ideas are based on a recent book by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore who started the ‘experience economy’ movement (‘sell experiences, not products’) some years back.

One can’t help but wonder whether they were inspired by Philip K Dick’s alternative reality novel The Man in the High Castle. One character, Mr Wyndham-Matson, is involved in selling fake antiques to unsuspecting punters.

The thing that makes the object valuable, suggests Wyndham-Matson, is ‘historicity’ – the perception that the object has been involved in something historically significant.

He notes that if an antique gun has gone through a famous battle “it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know“, with the implication that the feeling of history (and dare we say, authenticity), is as much to do with the smoke and mirrors of persuasion as it is to do with the properties of the product.

Link to Time article ‘Synthetic Authenticity’.

Beyond belief

Salon has a provocative article by neurologist Robert Burton who discusses what the neuroscience of belief means for how we understand the world, drawn from his new book, On Being Certain.

We’re going to be posting an interview with Burton on Mind Hacks in the near future, but the Salon article should give you a flavour of some of his thoughts the brain and belief.

What’s most curious about work on the neuropsychology of belief is that it barely touches upon the memory research where they’ve had many of these things under the microscope for years.

I’m a huge fan of the work of Israeli psychologist Asher Koriat who has done some absolutely stunning work on the control of memory.

This may seem a relatively dry topic, but think for a minute about how you use your memory.

For example, you’ve almost certainly had the experience where you know that you know something but can’t remember the details, or that you know you recognise something, but can’t remember the occasion when you encountered it before.

Also, we seem able to judge when we’ve remembered something to our satisfaction, but this is quite a remarkable feat in itself. Think about how we could possibly do this.

You could say we know because the memory matches other memories we have in mind, but then these are subject to the same problem – how do we know that we’ve remembered them correctly?

In other words, there must be another system at work, and one of the primary components of this is what psychologists call the ‘feeling of knowing’ that communicates between our unconscious pool of stored information and our conscious sense of how successfully our memory is operating.

Koriat discussed these processes in a 2000 paper [pdf] that was a revelation for me when I read it. It convinced me of the importance of these wormhole-like processes that connect the conscious and unconscious mind.

In his article, Burton suggests what social implications arise from the science of belief, suggesting we should be a little more humble when we state what we ‘know’.

Link to Salon article ‘The certainty epidemic’.
pdf of Koriat’s 2001 paper on the ‘feeling of knowing’.

A stroke of insight

We’ve discussed the remarkable neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor before but I’ve finally got round to watching her engaging TED talk on her experience of having a stroke, which is now available to watch online.

It’s a bit poetic in places. You can almost hear the sound of a thousand cognitive scientists gritting their teeth as she describes the supposed functions of each cerebral hemisphere and probably the sound of some of them fainting when she describes the “deep inner peace circuitry” of the right hemisphere.

Neuroanatomists may notice that this is almost exactly the same sound that occurs when psychologists describe something as a ‘frontal’ function.

The talk is gripping, however, and the highlight is her description of the day she had her stroke which is both insightful and very funny.

Link to video of Jill Bolte Taylor TED talk (thanks Sandra!)
Link to previous post on Jill Bolte Taylor with links to interview.

Pica: put your money where your mouth is

An upcoming article in the medical journal Clinical Toxicology reports on a man who suffered lead poisoning owing to his habit of eating roofing plates.

The tendency to eat the inedible is known as ‘pica‘. It is an established psychiatric diagnosis, is well-reported in the medical literature and has given us some of the more unusual case reports of recent years.

Although there is a specific diagnosis, the term is also used more widely as a general label for any eating behaviour that focuses on inedible objects.

Two of the most striking cases have involved coins. The x-ray on the right is from a case report from the New England Journal of Medicine where doctors discovered five and a half kilograms of coins, necklaces, and needles in a patient’s stomach.

In another case report from 1998, a British patient had swallowed £175.32 pounds worth of loose change and had a history of eating a wide range of curious objects:

At different times she has eaten tablets, coins, nuts, wire, plastic, ‘purple hearts’, Bob Martin’s dog conditioning powder and dried flowers. There is much comment made throughout her medical notes detailing vigorous negotiations about the colour, size, number, timing and supply of medication, including a large batch of hand-written letters to her doctor.

The behaviour in the more extreme cases in adults is usually associated with psychosis, as was the case with these two individuals.

It was also the case with one other gentleman, who had suffered lead poisoning after swallowing over 200 live bullets. The case report was rather wittily titled ‘Bite the Bullet’.

Normally, however, pica is most commonly seen in children with learning difficulties or autism spectrum diagnoses.

Perhaps giving partial support for the stereotype that pregnancy leads to unusual food cravings, it is known to occur more commonly in pregnant women, particularly from lower income families.

It’s not clear why it occurs, but interestingly, it has been linked to iron and zinc deficiencies.

Link to NEJM case report with x-ray.

The English Surgeon

I had the pleasure of watching a screening of a stunning new documentary called The English Surgeon yesterday. It’s a film about the work of London-based neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and his colleague Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine.

However, to say the film was just about brain surgery would be vastly under value its significance, and to describe it as a meditation on the humanity of medicine would be to confine it to a cliché.

Although Marsh normally works at St George’s, one of London’s most established hospitals, he has regularly travelled to the Ukraine for 15 years to assist the development of neurosurgery in this still struggling country.

The contrast itself is striking. One scene sees Marsh and Kurilets looking through street market hardware stalls for screws, rivets and power tools to use in their operations.

One of the most gripping scenes is where the two surgeons open a patient’s skull using a Bosch power drill only to find the battery is going flat as they proceed.

The man has been only given local anaesthetic as the Ukrainian hospital doesn’t have the facilities to safely put someone under and wake them up after initial part of the procedure.

Some of the most moving moments concern the tension between the shortcoming of medicine and the hope of the patients. There are many profound moments that aren’t well captured by brief summaries, and I’m sure each viewer takes something different away from them, so you’ll need to experience them for yourselves.

It’s probably worth saying that the film is also incredibly funny in places, partly owing to Marsh’s phlegmatic personality, but partly owing to the dark humour and comic irony posed by the situations that arise.

Marsh was the subject of another documentary by the same filmmaker created for the BBC as part of their medical series Your Life in Their Hands. Sadly, it’s not available online (or anywhere by the looks of it), but let me know if it appears as a torrent and I’ll link to it.

If you want to see it on the big screen there are screenings in Norwich, Brighton, London, York, Glasgow and Edinburgh before the end of March, and apparently it will be shown on BBC Two on March 30th.

International readers will have to hope for a torrent as things currently stand.

As an aside, the soundtrack was composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and is fittingly beautiful.

Link to film website (thanks Kat!).

Medical model behaviour

Journalist and campaigner Liz Spikol has written an excellent piece for the Philadelphia Weekly on the influence of the ‘medical model’ on how we understand and treat mental illness.

To simplify a little, the ‘medical model’ approach involves classifying mental distress or impaired behaviour as cut-and-dry diagnoses and assumes that these disorders are best understood at the level of neurobiological changes in individual patients.

Alternative approaches might consider that mental disorders are not always adequately described as by making a clear dividing line between mental illness and mental health and probably exist as a spectrum of differences (the continuum model), and that you need to understand more than just the brain to understand why people become distressed or disabled (such as social influences).

Needless to say, drug companies have a vested interest in promoting medical model because it implies drugs are the best treatment.

At the other end of the spectrum, some groups completely reject the medical model and any attempt to classify distressing mental states or research the neuroscience of mental disorders, often because they feel it upholds existing social orders or power structures with which they disagree.

What each of these extremes miss, however, is that the ‘medical model’ is a tool, a conceptual approach. In some situations it will be useful, in others misleading, and most importantly, it can be questioned and revised where necessary and can exist alongside other approaches.

Beware of any group that pushes a conceptual tool as an ideology. They are usually trying to sell you something.

This applies equally for drug companies and pressure groups.

Liz Spikol’s article is so good because it evaluates the medical model in context. In this case, in terms of attitudes, advertising and the law concerning mental illness.

Link to Liz Spikol’s Philadelphia Weekly article.

2008-03-14 Spike activity

Slightly late quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Neurophilosophy posts a ‘best of‘ collection of its many excellent articles online.

The Kinsey Institute for sex research have started their own blog and regular podcast on all matters sexual.

Social networks are like the eye. Edge has a video lecture on an evolutionary take on the development of society.

The New York Times reviews the recent discussion on whether it’s wrong for scientists to take cognitive enhancers. Not like it hasn’t been happening for four millennia already.

When can children make the distinction between jokes and lies? The BPS Research Digest has a piece on some fascinating new research and the APA Monitor has a past article on research on child humour from the same team.

Skeptic magazine has a great review of some of the key concepts in consciousness research in an article entitled ‘consciousness is nothing but a word’.

Psych Central discusses the recent news stories about a possible biological test for mood disorders.

To the bunkers! Simple nanotech experiment will one day lead to swarm of microscopic brain creatures, suggests BBC News article.

BBC News reports on a study that found that breathing engine exhaust fumes alters brain function. Full text available from PubMed entry.

Nominative determinism strikes again. The New York Times looks at the limits of the effects of our name on how we’re perceived.

Neuroanthropology has a piece on the anthropology of prisons and prisoners.

The New York Times again on differences in the DNA of identical twins, with the newly discovered copy number variations playing a key role.

The joy of boredom. The Boston Globe looks at the most undirectional of mental states.

The increasingly excellent Treatment Online discusses a recent study on genetic interactions in people with depression.

Jealousy in romantic relationships is associated with the height of partner, according to a study covered by New Scientist.

The excellent Simply Psychology has relaunched with a huge amount of psychology resources online.

The brain of Dionysus. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield discusses what the Ancient Greek tragedies can tell us about the brain in The Telegraph.

Following deep brain stimulation

Wired Science have got a great short film that follows a two people who have deep brain stimulation devices implanted in their brains to treat tremors.

Tremor is a symptom of Parkinson’s disease and this was one of the earliest targets for early DBS trials.

The film follows someone who has exactly this difficulty, plus someone who has a different form a tremor disorder, known as essential tremor, through the process of the operation.

While most people assume brain surgery is all pre-planned beforehand, for many treatments for cognitive or behavioural functions, the surgeons need to wake up the patient after they’ve open their skull to make sure they’re targeting the right place (and avoiding damaging essential functions).

In this case, they wake the patients up during neurosurgery so they can test out their movements while stimulating different areas of the brain, in a trial and error style.

Wired Science also has a shorter film online about the post-mortem dissection of a brain of a patient who had Alzheimer’s disease that’s also well worth having a look at.

Link to video of deep brain stimulation neurosurgery.
Link to video on ‘The Brain of an Alzheimer’s Patient’.

A personal note / una nota personal

I qualify as a clinical psychologist in September and would like to work in Latin America for 6 months to a year afterwards.

If you know anyone in Spanish speaking Latin America who might be interested employing a newly qualified clinical psychologist who speaks passable Spanish (with room for improvement) and has a PhD in cognitive neuropsychiatry, please get in touch.

I can send my CV in Spanish or English and am happy to consider all types of psychology job.

For those not familiar with the world of psychology, Latin American has a long tradition of valuing psychology as an important scientific and clinical pursuit.

The first university course teaching psychology in Latin America started in 1897 and was taught by Prof Ezequiel Chavez in the Preparatory School of Mexico, five years later to become the National University of Mexico.

The first experimental psychology lab opened in 1891 in San Juan in Argentina, with the first university lab opening in 1898 in the Colegio Nacional of Buenos Aires.

In 1907 Latin America’s first professional psychology association was launched – the Sociedad de Estudios Psicologicos that gathered psychologists from across the region.

Owing to periods of social and political turmoil, Latin American psychology has traditionally been focused on applied research and practice – aiming to use psychology to improve the health and well-being of the population.

Latin America maintains a leading role in world psychology. As a testament to this, the Internation Neuropsychological Society will be holding their July conference jointly with the Neuropsychology Society of Argentina in Buenos Aires.

So, you can see why I’m keen to work in the region.

pdf of article on the history of Latin American psychology.

Inner speech signals, but isn’t a psychic telephone

New Scientist reports on a neck-band technology that allows the wearer’s silent thoughts to trigger messages over a phone line.

It sounds impressive, but the video that accompanies the story makes it look like the technology reads your inner thoughts and transmits them as sounds, when it fact it does something far more basic.

Whenever we think to ourselves, rather curiously, the vocal chords get activated very slightly – faintly mirroring what would happen if we were to say the words out loud.

This is known as subvocal speech and can be picked up by EMG sensors on the neck that pick up the tiny electrical signals generated by the weakly activated muscles.

While the technology doesn’t exist to turn these signals back into speech, it is possible to train the system to distinguish between a number of different general patterns which can trigger specific computer commands.

Lancet Neurology reported in 2004 that the same team had a basic system running that recognised six words (stop, go, left, right, alpha, omega) and 10 digits, to allow ‘silent’ control of a machine or a software application.

The team seem to have developed the technology and it can apparently now recognise many more commands, however, it doesn’t ‘translate’ thoughts into their corresponding words.

In the video, the wearer is triggering sound recordings of specific sentences, pre-arranged to provide answers to the rehearsed telephone ‘conversation’. Still impressive, but not a genuine conversation in the way we would normally think of it.

As an aside, for more than 20 years now, we’ve know that subvocal speech accompanies hallucinated voices in people who have been diagnosed with psychosis.

This means people who hear constant hallucinated voices will probably not be able to use the system effectively.

However, we now know that healthy individuals have much higher levels of hallucinations than previously thought, although most people are not bothered or distressed by them.

For example, in a 2004 study Louise Johns and colleagues found that 0.7% of the British population had experienced an auditory hallucination in the last year.

It’s interesting to speculate that a significant minority of the population might experience problems with this technology as their hallucinations accidentally trigger commands or send messages on their behalf!

Link to NewSci story ‘Nerve-tapping neckband allows ‘telepathic’ chat’.
Link to video of product presentation.