Mind Hacks

A 61 year-old lady was admitted to a Florida hospital with florid hallucinations after suffering a stroke to her thalamus. She saw curious strangers and visitors with odd clothes, but rather unusually, the ones on the right always seemed pleasant and happy, whereas the ones on the left always seemed fearful and unsettling.

The case was reported in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and is of interest because the emotional content of the hallucinations seem to match the dominant emotion of the corresponding hemisphere of the brain.

[The patient] described the right visual hallucinations as consisting of “college age boys in colourful Hawaiian shirts” that “are too happy, talk too much”, and that are somewhat “too energetic”. The patient called them the “he-haw boys,” and reported that she could hear them talking.

The left visual hallucinations were described as “men in black religious clothes that make no noises.” The patient called them “the eye drillers”, and stated that “they look a hole right through you”. The patient provided vivid drawings of the hallucinations that accentuated the positive and negative associations she had with each hallucination. The patient provided vivid drawings of the hallucinations that accentuated the positive and negative associations she had with each hallucination.

This is not the first time that hallucinations have been reported to be differing in emotional tone depending on which side of space they appear.

This is likely due to the way emotion is processed in the brain.

Perception of negative emotions often relies largely on the right hemisphere, where positive emotions are processed by both the right and the left hemispheres. In fact, this pattern of brain response has been found in children as young as 10 months old.

The woman in this case report didn’t suffer damage to the hemispheres directly, but to the thalamus. This area is often called the brain’s relay station as it is extensively connected to hemispheres, so damage in this area can often mimic damage to the cortex.

Link to PubMed abstract of case report.

‘Impostor Syndrome’ is where someone feels they aren’t as competent as everyone else thinks they are and fears they could be found out.

I’ve heard the term used by psychologists and in everyday language to describe this situation but never realised it’s been the subject of serious psychological research.

Several studies have looked at the issue and The New York Times has a brief article on the findings. They suggest that the ‘syndrome’ is actually more subtle than the simple description lets on – in fact, it may be a way of managing others’ expectations.

In a study published in September [pdf], Rory O’Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., had 253 students take an exhaustive battery of tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.

In an interview, Dr. McElwee said that as a social strategy, projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person — as long as the self-deprecation doesn’t go too far. “It’s the difference between saying you got drunk before the SAT and actually doing it,” she said. “One provides a ready excuse, and the other is self-destructive.”

Link to NYT article on ‘impostor syndrome’.
pdf of McElwee and Yurak’s paper.

Clinical psychologist Dan Kindlon has been researching children and adolescents for over 20 years and argues that the psychology of American girls has radically changed in recent years owing to the effect of feminism and increased equality.

Harvard Magazine has an article on what he calls ‘alpha girls’ in his new book – confident girls and young women with high expectations and high self-esteem.

“The psychological demons that used to affect girls and women in this country just don‚Äôt affect today‚Äôs girls in the same way,” Kindlon asserts. In the 1980s and early ‚Äô90s, Carol Gilligan (formerly Graham professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education and now a professor at New York University) and other feminist psychologists wrote that girls in their teens compromise their authenticity to fit gender roles, thereby “losing their voice.” In 1992, influential American Association of University Women (AAUW) research on late-1980s data on girls born in the 1970s found that girls’ self-esteem plunged in middle school, compared to boys’, and that classroom sexism (such as teachers’ calling on boys more than girls, or more competitive than cooperative learning) was a cause. The AAUW report recognized positive trends, such as young women‚Äôs ascent in college enrollment, while recommending correctives for the continuing shortfalls.

Alpha girls are created in large numbers when the society that they are born into has sufficient equal opportunity, Kindlon says: “It wasn‚Äôt until the early to mid ’80s‚Äîwhen schools really started to get serious about Title IX, when women first began to outnumber men in college, when women began moving into leadership roles, such as Congress, in significant numbers‚Äîthat societal conditions had changed enough to permit the alpha girl explosion.” He set out to discover how Beauvoir’s “inner metamorphosis” has changed girls’ psychology in the years since the AAUW report.

Link to Harvard Magazine article ‘Girl Power’.

Until fashions changed in recent decades, a tattoo was widely considered the mark of the soldier, the sailor or the criminal. The tattoos of offenders have sparked particular interest as they can be highly symbolic coded messages that have been thought to be a glimpse into the psychology of the criminal underworld.

The interest in ‘criminal ink’ stretches back to the 19th century when Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso started collecting pictures of tattoos from captured or murdered Mafiosos.

Lombroso believed that persistent offenders were biologically defective who reflected an ‘atavistic‘ throwback to a primitive stage of human development.

He further believed that criminal tendencies could be seen in the shape of the face, skull and body, and could be divined by studying tattoos, which were a reflection of the “fierce and obscene hearts of these unfortunates”.

While Lombroso’s ideas on criminality and the body proved to be little more than prejudice and conclusions drawn from poorly guided research (he failed to compare how often the same traits appear in non-criminals) the idea that criminal tattoos were a sort of ‘symbolic code’ proved to be closer to the mark.

Russian prison tattoos from the Soviet era are some of the most complex of these symbolic codes and determine an offender’s place within the strictly organised and brutally enforced criminal social order.

Russian prison guard Danzig Baldaev collected pictures of these tattoos for over 40 years, mostly during the period of Soviet-run gulags, and carefully documented the images and their meanings.

He published a Russian book on the tattoos in 2001 and later his work was re-published in English in two volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia.

Racist, graphically pornographic and violent images are common but apparently accurately reflect the vicious and oppressive nature of the prison camps. Others are political, some romantic, and many a combination of a number of these themes.

The images are satirical, offensive and disturbing both in their explicit content and their implicit meaning. While some are ‘earned’, others are forcibly applied and intended as punishments.

The tattoos are intended to reflect the life, status and experiences of the prisoner, and most importantly, they allow others to ‘read’ the person in the most literal sense.

The Russian criminal tattoo is a means of secret communication, an esoteric language of representational images which the thief’s body uses to inform the world of thieves about itself. This language resembles thieves’ argot and it performs a similar function – encoding secret thieves’ information to protect it from outsiders (fraera). In exactly the same way as argot endows standard, neutral words with ‘strictly professional’ meanings, the tattoo also conveys ‘secret’ symbolic knowledge through the use of ordinary allegorical images which at first glance seem familiar to everyone. Even the tattoo ‘Heil Hitler!’, when applied to the body of a Russian ‘legitimate thief’ (vor v zakone) may have absolutely nothing to do with Hitler or National Socialism in general. As a rule it is a sign of a thief’s attitude of denial (otritsalovka) or the symbol of a refusal to submit to the prison and camp administration and also, in a broader sense, a total refusal to cooperate in any way with the Soviet authorities. (p33, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Vol II).

In effect, these tattoos embody a thief’s complete ‘service record’, his entire biography. They detail all of his achievements and failures, his promotions and demotions, his ‘secondments’ to jail and his ‘transfers’ to different types of work. A thief’s tattoos are his ‘passport’, ‘case file’, ‘awards record’, ‘diplomas’ and ‘epitaphs’. In other words, his full set of official bureaucratic documents… Tattoos acts as symbols of public identity, social self-awareness and collective memory. They shape stereotypes of group behaviour and set out the rules and rituals necessary for maintaining order in the world of thieves. (p27, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Vol I).

The symbols are extensive and complicated, and owing to their importance, the penalty for faking an unearned tattoo could be a swift and brutal death.

There is a grim irony in the fact that many in the Russian criminal underworld saw themselves as rebelling against the Soviet system while creating a subculture which was more oppressive and almost as bureaucratic. I suspect, however, the irony was lost on many.

The tattoos from the Soviet gulags are not the sole examples, of course. Many criminal gangs use tattoos as a pledge of allegiance and a record of past experience, to the point where Mara Salvatrucha gang members are now trying to avoid getting their distinctive tattoos so the authorities can’t identify and ‘read’ them so easily.

Link to NSFW info/images from Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia I.
Link to NSFW info/images from Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia II.
Link to SFW images from the same collection.
pdf of good essay on Cesare Lombroso, his theories and influence.

I’ve been enjoying the Neuroanthropology blog recently which discusses how the cognitive and neurosciences can help us understand culture and social diversity.

For example, trance states are common in some cultures, where they may form the part of certain religious rituals or spirit possession experiences.

There is now increasing interest in understanding the neuroscience of trance states, with a view to better understanding both how they occur and how they are used as key parts of social life by cultures across the world.

The Neuroanthropology blog disusses how culture shapes and interacts with brain function, and what new research tell us about our cultural quirks.

Link to Neuroanthropology blog.