A blind man hallucinating

NPR has an brief but interesting piece on a blind man who has visual hallucinations.

Stewart, the person in question, lost his sight due to hereditary sight-loss, but has developed Charles Bonnet syndrome, a curious condition where playful visual hallucinations are common.

Two things about this condition are striking: firstly, the hallucinations are typically complex and intricate but the damage is typically only to the retina, the cortex remains intact.

Secondly, unlike many other conditions where hallucinations are common, the person typically retains complete insight. They know they are hallucinating and typically don’t mistake hallucinations for the real world.

While the person interviewed in this radio segment is blind, Charles Bonnet syndrome can occur in people with partial sight, who may have only lost vision in one part of their visual field (often due to macular degeneration). In these cases, even when the hallucinations can ‘blend in’ with true vision, the person usually knows the difference.

One of the most remarkable things about the interview is that the Stewart’s hallucinations can be triggered by quite idiosyncratic things (such as foods and thoughts) and that he takes such joy in the experience.

If you want to read more about the syndrome, the Fortean Times published a great article on it back in 2004.

Link to NPR segment on Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Link to FT article on the same.

Illegal ink: reading meaning in criminal tattoos

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.

Neuroanthropology

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.

An embuggerance

Author Terry Pratchett recently announced that he has early onset Alzheimer’s disease, a form of the brain disorder that strikes before the age of 65.

In typical Pratchett style, he described the news as ‘an embuggerance’ but still continues to work on his comic novels.

He’s just given an audio interview to the BBC where he discusses his diagnosis, how he views the future, and how the brain changes are affecting his day-to-day life.

He is wonderfully open and optimistic, and quite inspiring, in his usual quiet, humorous way.

Link to BBC audio interview with Terry Pratchett.

Deep brain stimulation opens memory floodgates

Neurophilosophy has a great write-up of the recent finding that deep brain stimulation boosted memory function in a patient undergoing brain surgery to treat morbid obesity.

I’ve only just got round to having a look at the scientific paper myself, and the summary on Neurophilosophy captures the main themes beautifully, and is some of the best coverage I’ve read so far.

A couple of things stand out for me.

Firstly, the patient was given a last-ditch experimental treatment for obesity by having an electrode planted in the ventral hypothalamus, a deep brain structure, to try and reduce his appetite.

The hypothalamus is involved in regulating a number of essential bodily functions and most pertinently, contains glucoreceptors – cells that detect levels of glucose in the body to regulate feeding and appetite.

A lot has been written about the role of ‘mechanical’ models of the mind and brain in undermining our sense of free will and responsibility for our actions.

This case suggests that we’ve now got to the stage where an inability to control a biological urge which negatively affects few people except the patient himself, is reason enough to consider neurosurgery.

I wonder whether deep brain stimulation for people who can’t give up cigarettes, alcohol or self-harm will be next.

Secondly, the immediate effect of the stimulation on the patient, who was flooded with numerous vivid memories, is quite striking:

Unexpectedly, the patient reported sudden sensations that he described as déjà vu with stimulation of the first contact tested (contact 4: 3.0 volts, 60-microsecond pulse width [pw], and 130Hz). He reported the sudden perception of being in a park with friends, a familiar scene to him. He felt he was younger, around 20 years old. He recognized his epoch-appropriate girlfriend among the people. He did not see himself in the scene, but instead was an observer. The scene was in color; people were wearing identifiable clothes and were talking, but he could not decipher what they were saying. As the stimulation intensity was increased from 3.0 to 5.0 volts, he reported that the details in the scene became more vivid.

This is a strikingly similar experience to the memories triggered by electrical stimulation of the surface of the temporal lobe reported by legendary Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the 50s and 60s:

The other response is an activation of the stream of past experience. This is what the patient often refers to as a ‘flash-back’ to his own past. When the electrode is applied, he may exclaim in surprise, as the young secretary, M M, did: ‘Oh, I had a very, very familiar memory, in an office somewhere. I could see the desks. I was there and someone was calling to me, a man leaning on a desk with a pencil in his hand.’ Or the patient may call out in astonishment, as J T did (when the current was switched on without his knowledge): ‘Yes, Doctor, yes, Doctor! Now I hear people laughing – my friends in South Africa … Yes, they are my two cousins, Bessie and Ann Wheliaw.’

However, despite testing over 600 patients in this way, less than 8% had the experience of electrically triggered memories, and the effect has not been reliably replicated by modern researchers.

This suggests that the flood of memories triggered by stimulating the hypothalamus in this new study, perhaps may not happen in all people.

Of course the big finding in this new study was not the triggered memories, but that when the stimulation was switched on for longer periods, the patient did much better in memory tests.

It will be interesting to see whether this general effect on memory is perhaps as unpredictable across individuals as electrically evoked memories have proved to be in the past.

Link to Neurophilosophy post on the new study.
Link to abstract of scientific paper.
Link to Penfield’s paper (with evoked memory memory examples).

2008-02-01 Spike activity

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

Best Life magazine has probably one of the most sensible articles I’ve yet come across on back pain. Another good read by Jonah Lehrer, who you may know from the Frontal Cortex blog.

Morons and Idiots Buy a Brain! Omni Brain finds an odd hip-hop video that encourages us to purchase a new cerebrum.

Sharp Brains has a fantastic review of its most popular recent articles.

Mobile phones disrupt sleep (lectures, movies, funerals).

The San Francisco Chronicle discusses the new exhibits at the SF Exploratorium that allow you to watch your own mind at work.

People use the internet to confirm their pre-existing beliefs. So, no different from any other source of information then.

SciAm discusses ‘evolutionary economics‘ and what it tells us about how we reason about money.

A fantastically comprehensive article on the treatment of multiple sclerosis made it to the front page of Wikipedia this week.

Cognitive Daily has an article on the cognitive psychology of film. Interestingly, in the Richard Gregory talk I linked to the other day, he notes very little is known about how we comprehend film across shots. This post covers exactly this process!

This history of theories about mind over medical matters and the psychology of illness is covered in an article from Slate.

BBC News reports on a new study that has found that world-wide, the risk of depression peaks at 44, except in America.

The Wall Street Journal look at studies that cite head injuries as a factor in antisocial behaviour, offending and other social ills.

Salon has a polemic piece on antidepressants and the ‘medicalisation of misery’.

A special infrared hat that cures Alzheimer’s? Respectful Insolence has a rightly sceptical look at the odd contraption.

The Phineas Gage Fan Club discusses a recent study showing suggesting that sleep ‘disconnects’ the brain’s emotional circuits.

National Geographic has a fun and beautiful interactive brain demo.

An article in The Atlantic argues that multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

Frontiers in Neuroscience is a new open-access neuroscience journal. Bravo!

Anvil therapy

The following passage is from p107 of the excellent but sadly out-of-print history book Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain (ISBN 0708305628) that explores mental and neurological illness in times past.

As well as discussing the theories of the times, it also charts many of the treatments used to try and cure disturbances of the mind and brain.

This is a particularly terrifying example of a (probably 16-17th century) folk treatment for depression that involved the local blacksmith pretending he was going to flatten your head on an anvil:

A highly specific treatment for ‘faintness of the spirits’ was attributed in a well-known passage by Martin Martin to a blacksmith in the Skye parish of Kilmartin. Like other shock treatments which have tried to elicit a ‘natural’ total reaction by creating a physical or physiological emergency, it had its risks.

“The patient laid on the anvil with his face uppermost, the smith takes a big hammer in both his hands, and making his face all grimace, he approaches his patient; and then drawing his hammer from the ground as if to hit him with full strength on his forehead, he ends in a feint, else he would be sure to cure the patient of all diseases; but the smith being accustomed to the performance, has a dexterity of managing his hammer with discretion; though at the same time he must do it so as to strike terror in the patient; and this they say, has always the desired effect.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a little vague on what the ‘desired effect’ was supposed to be.

It wasn’t all hammer wielding blacksmiths though, some gentler treatments are noted. Apparently, dried cuckoo was used to treat epilepsy.

Haunted by Dracula’s Teeth Syndrome

This case report from a 2001 study describes a patient with persistent headaches who experienced ‘phantom teeth’ – the sensation of non-existent vampire-like teeth in her mouth.

‘Phantoms‘ are often the result of having a limb or other appendage removed and can affect almost any part of the body (indeed, phantom penises have been reported in the medical literature).

In this case phantom teeth seem to have occurred after surgical removal of the gums, although this case is particularly interesting because the phantoms are for teeth that were never there in the first place.

Phantoms are thought to arise when the brain’s map of the sensory areas becomes distorted during re-organisation, after the actual sensations from the removed appendage stop.

A 52-year-old woman was referred to a neurologist because of right facial pain radiating from the malar region diagonally to the right upper lip area. She had pain for several months following upper and lower surgical resection of hypertrophic gums. The pain was severe, constant, and interfered with her sleep. She had no gustatory sweating or flushing of her face or neck. She developed symptoms of depression because of the chronic pain…

She reported a constant sensation of having two long extra upper canine teeth growing in front of her normal canines that felt like they were pressing on her tongue. The sensation was experienced as someone with vampire-like long upper canines (“Dracula’s teeth”)…

There was no family history of gum hyperplasia or supernumerary teeth. She complained of poor taste, forgetfulness, sleep fragmentation, and high-pitched ringing noises in her ears of long-standing. She had no burning of her tongue.

Link to abstract of scientific study.

Kissing, corporate evil and a pat on the head

The new Scientific American Mind has just arrived online with its customary couple of feature articles freely available online. The issue also has a review of psychology and neuroscience blogs, which kindly features Mind Hacks.

According to the review SciAmMind “offers up a hearty helping of science” whereas blogs offer “extra crumbs of brain candy”. Nothing like getting patronised by the best I guess.

Apart from that though, they actually say some pretty complementary things about a number of online mind and brain blogs, so it can’t be all that bad.

One of their freely available feature articles is on the psychology and neuroscience of kissing.

Human lips enjoy the slimmest layer of skin on the human body, and the lips are among the most densely populated with sensory neurons of any body region. When we kiss, these neurons, along with those in the tongue and mouth, rocket messages to the brain and body, setting off delightful sensations, intense emotions and physical reactions.

Of the 12 or 13 cranial nerves that affect cerebral function, five are at work when we kiss, shuttling messages from our lips, tongue, cheeks and nose to a brain that snatches information about the temperature, taste, smell and movements of the entire affair. Some of that information arrives in the somatosensory cortex, a swath of tissue on the surface of the brain that represents tactile information in a map of the body. In that map, the lips loom large because the size of each represented body region is proportional to the density of its nerve endings.

The other freely available article apparently discusses what capitalism and the corporate world can tell us about the psychology of competition and altruism, but seems largely an enthusiastic description of Google’s business practices – novel as they may be.

Link to article ‘Affairs of the Lips’.
Link to article ‘Do All Companies Have to be Evil?’.

The bitchy world of online match making

The New York Times has an interesting yet ironically funny article about the curious world of online dating companies who use ‘psychological profiles’ to try and make love blossom, but who can’t get along with one another.

These are sites like eHarmony, Chemistry and PerfectMatch that instead of letting you browse members’ profiles, ask you to fill in questionnaires and suggest dates based on your ‘psychological compatibility’.

They use various methods to make the matches that are supposedly based on psychological science, but which haven’t been published or released so others can see how valid they are (is that the distant sound of alarm bells I can hear?).

Most amusingly, they seem to be constantly putting each other down in a bid to get the most attention from potential lovers.

In the battle of the matchmakers, Chemistry.com has been running commercials faulting eHarmony for refusing to match gay couples (eHarmony says it can’t because its algorithm is based on data from heterosexuals), and eHarmony asked the Better Business Bureau to stop Chemistry.com from claiming its algorithm had been scientifically validated. The bureau concurred that there was not enough evidence, and Chemistry.com agreed to stop advertising that Dr. Fisher’s method was based on “the latest science of attraction.”

Dr. Fisher now says the ruling against her last year made sense because her algorithm at that time was still a work in progress as she correlated sociological and psychological measures, as well as indicators linked to chemical systems in the brain. But now, she said, she has the evidence from Chemistry.com users to validate the method, and she plans to publish it along with the details of the algorithm.

“I believe in transparency,” she said, taking a dig at eHarmony. “I want to share my data so that I will get peer review.”

And Bravo to that. Largely because, as the article notes, the information from the millions of people filling in these questionnaires is a potentially valuable source of scientific data.

If the questionnaires become scientifically validated and the algorithms tested, these sites could make an important contribution to understanding the psychology of attraction.

I doubt very much whether they will improve the chances of a long-term relationship (John Gottman’s fascinating work suggests the crucial aspects are in interaction style, not the attraction) but they may tell us a few things about how we get drawn towards potential mates.

Obviously though, the companies will have to be a little more open and stop being so defensive. Learn to trust one another. Open their hearts. Stop in the name of love.

And if you’re still cynical, you may want to check out an article in this month’s Time by the fantastic Carl Zimmer, looking at the evolution of romance.

Romance, it seems, is not a uniquely human pursuit, as it occurs throughout the animal kingdom – unaided by technology. A beautifully romantic idea if you think about it.

Link to NYT article ‘Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love’.
Link to Time article ‘Romance is an Illusion’.

The highs and lows of brain doping

Today’s edition of Nature has some commentary from scientists responding to their recent feature on ‘optimising’ the healthy brain with pharmaceutical drugs.

I suspect the letters have been edited a little though, as the first, from developmental psychologist James M. Swanson and neurobiologist Nora Volkow (who is also director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse) seems to suggest that enhancement drugs risk being addictive because:

…cognitive enhancers such as the stimulants methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamine amplify the activity of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that increases saliency, making cognitive tasks and everyday activities seem more interesting and rewarding. This learned experience can lead to abuse of the drug and to compulsive use and addiction in vulnerable people.

These drugs are widely used for cognitive enhancement, but the issue is hardly new as these are relatively old drugs that almost solely target the dopamine system, whereas the newer ‘cognitive enhancement’ drugs (most notably modafinil) work in a quite different way (modafinil alters dopamine, among other effects, but it’s hardly comparable).

Hence, they do not have the same pharmacological potential for abuse and simply aren’t found to be as addictive as the amphetamines in the ‘real world’.

In fact, when the Nature article asked the hypothetical question whether you would take an enhancing drug if it had no side effects, it was almost certainly inspired by modafinil.

While the drug isn’t side-effect free (several are common) it tends to be significantly less risky than your typical high-charge dopamine agonist such as amphetamine, which can cause cardiovascular problems and psychosis to name but a few of its dangerous effects.

That issue aside, one of the most interesting points is made in a letter from philosopher Nick Bostrom who argues that drug companies should be allowed to develop enhancement drugs without having to specify an illness to treat.

He argues this is because the current system demands that drugs are licensed for a specific disorder, which means new disorders get invented (‘disease mongering‘) as a way of legitimising the sale of drugs which are helpful but for less serious problems of living, such as low-level anxiety, persistent tiredness or normal memory decline, but are not significant medical treatments.

So maybe the solution to the drug companies warping medicine is to allow them to sell drugs as ‘tonics’, rather than medications. Certainly food for thought.

There’s several other responses on the ethics and experiences of cognitive enhancement from some of the leaders in the field, so well worth a look through.

Link to ‘brain doping’ correspondence in Nature

False trails in the pursuit of consciousness

Seed Magazine has an excellent article by Nicholas Humphrey on understanding consciousness and why current attempts may be failing because we’re asking the wrong questions.

Humphrey suggests four questions which he feels are more relevant to the problem, and, with a rhetorical flourish, suggests some answers to them.

However, one of the most interesting parts is where he discusses philosopher Jerry Fodor’s interest in what consciousness is useful for:

Fodor has stated this aspect of the problem bluntly: “There are several reasons why consciousness is so baffling. For one thing, it seems to be among the chronically unemployed. What mental processes can be performed only because the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness contribute to their performance? As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they weren’t conscious. Why then did God bother to make consciousness?”

Fodor is undoubtedly asking the right question: “Why did God‚Äîor rather natural selection‚Äîmake consciousness?” Yet I’d suggest the reason he finds it all so baffling is that he is starting off with the completely wrong premise, for he has assumed, as indeed almost everyone else does, that phenomenal consciousness must be providing us with some kind of new skill. In other words, it must be helping us do something that we can do only by virtue of being conscious, in the way that, say, a bird can fly only because it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because you know English.

Yet I want to suggest the role of phenomenal consciousness may not be like this at all. Its role may not be to enable us to do something we could not do otherwise, but rather to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.

Even if you don’t agree with Humphrey’s take on consciousness (of course, in consciousness research, it’s de rigeur to disagree with almost everyone) it’s a thought-provoking and clearly written piece.

As an aside, the cover story on the same issue of Seed Magazine is a piece by Jonah Lehrer on IBM’s large-scale low-level brain simulation project Blue Brain. It’s not freely available online, however, so you’ll need to hit the news stands or the library to have a read.

Link to Seed article ‘Questioning Consciousness’.

The significance of day dreams

From p353 of The Psychology of Day-Dreams by Dr J. Varendonck, published in 1921:

Like nocturnal dreams, day dreams betray preoccupations with unsolved problems, harassing cares, or overwhelming impressions which require accommodation, only their language is not as sibylline as that of their unconscious correspondents…

But they all strive towards the future; they all seem to prepare some accommodation, to obtain some prospective advantage to the ego; in fine, they are attempts at adaptation: such is their biological meaning. They complete the functions of consciousness without our mental alertness.

Varendonck was attempting to apply Freud’s theory of dreaming to daydreams, and, as was customary at the time, largely based his theories on ideas generated from his own daydreams.

I had to look up ‘sibylline’. Apparently it relates to the Sibylline oracles and in this context it means ‘knowledge giving’.

My first book of hallucinogenic drugs

It’s not often a children’s book on hallucinogenic drugs gets written, but this seems to be one of those occasions. Matt Hutson has scanned in some remarkable pages from exactly such a book, published in 1991.

Apparently it’s quite comprehensive, covering everything from neurons to shamans, and is also full of funky illustrations.

The prose is lucid, but the pictures crack me up. Take the cover. Look kids, in a drug free zone, you can do all kinds of things, like play tic-tac-toe. Or even watch people play tic-tac-toe! And remember, friends don’t let friends wear non-footie pants.

In some cases the book might be counterproductive: “Have you ever looked at yourself in an amusement park mirror? Look what happened to you! Now, try to imagine that the whole world looked that way to you.” Awesome! Where can I get some?

Link to Silver Jacket on ‘Focus on Hallucinogens’.

Second linkenium

I’ve just discovered we’ve had our 2000th user bookmark us on del.icio.us. Users can also add notes to their bookmarks, so I thought I’d share some of the comments with you.

Neuroscience weblog. Often exciting, sometimes unsettling.

Or your money back.

Good sight.

..excellent hearing, and all our own marbles (so far).

like the design, esp. the underlines for links.

Thanks to Matt’s excellent design skills.

Weblog oficial del libro Mind Hacks.

¬°Bienvenidos a nuestros queridos lectores hispanohablantes!

Entertaining blog about mind/brain things.

I like the precision. If we had a design brief, I think that would be it.

I still have to read the book. I gave it as a birthday present to Rudin and I should borrow it in the near future. I’ll check out the blog regularly till then.

And they say the internet is killing literature.

science of biomental creature

Next week, return of the biomental creature (this time it’s personal).

Crazy/beautiful

Aren’t we all?

and my favourite…

One of the biggest Cogsci blogs… sometimes they post a big bunch of crap (luckily its different most of time)

Enough said.

Facing down the competition in business and politics

The Economist covers an intriguing study that found the financial success of a company can be largely guessed by making a judgement based on photographs of the chief executives.

Most interestingly, the people doing the guessing weren’t particularly skilled in business or finance, they were undergraduate student volunteers.

And Dr Ambady and Mr Rule were surprised by just how accurate the students’ observations were. The results of their study, which are about to be published in Psychological Science, show that both the students’ assessments of the leadership potential of the bosses and their ratings for the traits of competence, dominance and facial maturity were significantly related to a company’s profits. Moreover, the researchers discovered that these two connections were independent of each other. When they controlled for the ‚Äúpower‚Äù traits, they still found the link between perceived leadership and profit, and when they controlled for leadership they still found the link between profit and power.

These findings suggest that instant judgments by the ignorant (nobody even recognised Warren Buffett) are more accurate than assessments made by well-informed professionals. It looks as if knowing a chief executive disrupts the ability to judge his performance.

Other studies have looked at whether it is possible to judge the success of politicians from their photographs.

Perhaps sadly, it seems it is possible. A study [pdf] published in Evolution and Human Behavior found that face shape could reliably predict voter preference in nine leadership elections from four countries – Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA.

A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that photograph-only judgements of competence could also predict the winners in election for US state governor, even when they were flashed on-screen for less than a quarter of a second.

Interestingly, showing people the faces for longer actually changed people’s competency ratings and reduced how well these judgements predicted the election winners.

Link to Economist article ‘Face value’.