Mind Hacks

Inkling has an interesting article on the effect of stress on the menstrual cycle that investigates the received wisdom that stress can prevent periods.

It turns out the scientific studies have found no conclusive answer as they’ve returned mixed results, but this may be because they don’t adequately distinguish between physical stress and psychological stress.

A range of physical health problems are known to halt menstruation. Malnutrition is a common example and this is why women with anorexia often don’t have periods.

Of course, physical and psychological stress go hand in hand, but one study that looked at healthy young women under a great deal of psychological stress, but no major physical health problems, found no alteration in the menstrual cycle.

So Ellison examined female juniors at Harvard who were preparing for the MCAT [Medical College Admission Test] and compared their anxiety levels (and ovulation schedules) to women who were not preparing for the MCAT. In order to make sure there were no other factors at play, all the women were otherwise physically healthy, were not using any oral contraceptive pill that would change hormone levels, and all reported normal ovulation…

But despite the significant increase in stress, there was no change in ovulation or periods in either group. No matter how stressed these students were about the upcoming exam, they continued to have a visit from Aunt Flow right on schedule. This was even the case during the final days and weeks leading up to the MCAT exam, when the subjects described intense stress levels that only Harvard pre-meds can sustain. The study was published in the December 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

There’s more on the effects of stress on menstruation in the article.

Link to Inkling article ‘Of Stress and Periods’.

The Boston Globe just published an excellent article on ‘embodied cognition‘, an area that’s recently been getting a lot of attention in cognitive science and which argues that we can’t understand psychology without understanding the body and our actions.

The reason it’s so potentially revolutionary is that it challenges the idea that psychology can be understood as a purely abstract mental process and suggests that our mind is shaped as much by our body and how we physically interact with the environment as by ‘passive’ sensory experience.

In other words, the reason we’ve developed thinking brains is to allow us to act, and so the possibilities, limitations and feedback from actions must shape our psychology – both in the long term as a species (via evolution) and in the short term as individuals (via learning and plasticity).

The body, it appears, can subtly shape people’s preferences. A study led by John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, found that subjects (all non-Chinese speakers) shown a series of Chinese ideographs while either pushing down or pulling up on a table in front of them will say they prefer the ideographs they saw when pulling upward over the ones they saw while pushing downward. Work by Beilock and Holt found that expert typists, when shown pairs of two-letter combinations and told to pick their favorite, tend to pick the pairs that are easier to type – without being able to explain why they did so.

Some of my favourite research in this area is by psychologist Dennis Proffitt who has found a range of bodily effects on perception.

In one particularly striking study, Proffitt and his colleagues found that we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand, but only when we intend to use it.

They suggest that we perceive the environment in terms of our intentions and abilities to act within it.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘Don’t just stand there, think’.
Link to great introduction to embodied cognition.

I always assumed Early Science and Medicine was what happened during 9am ward meetings, but it’s apparently an academic history journal.

In a recent issue, it has a curious article that discusses a ‘plague’ of ‘hypochondria‘ (an unfounded fear of serious illness) that apparently swept through the Jesuit community in 17th century Naples.

The first sentence of the abstract is completely priceless.

Poetry or pathology? Jesuit hypochondria in early modern Naples.

Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2), 187-213.

Haskell Y.

In their didactic poems on fishing and chocolate, both published in 1689, two Neapolitan Jesuits digressed to record and lament a devastating ‘plague’ of ‘hypochondria’. The poetic plagues of Niccol√≤ Giannettasio and Tommaso Strozzi have literary precedents in Lucretius, Vergil, and Fracastoro, but it will be argued that they also have a real, contemporary significance. Hypochondria was considered to be a serious (and epidemic) illness in the seventeenth century, with symptoms ranging from depression to delusions. Not only did our Jesuit poets claim to have suffered from it, but so did prominent members of the ‘Accademia degl’Investiganti’, a scientific society in Naples that was at odds with both the religious and medical establishments.

Link to PubMed entry.

Christian Nold maps cities. But instead of mapping their physical layout, he maps their emotional geography.

He uses a technique he invented called biomapping where participants walk the area connected to a system that measures galvanic skin response – a measure of the electrical resistance of the skin which is known to give a rating of arousal and stress.

The system is also connected to a GPS device, so the stress response of each person is physically mapped onto the landscape.

His maps describe an area in terms of how stressful it is, and so far, he’s mapped Greenwich in London, San Francisco and Stockport.

He’s also done a project that maps the sensory experiences of Newham.

I had the pleasure of meeting Christian the other night and one of the best things is is that he’s persuaded Ordinance Survey, the UK’s mapping agency, to print the maps!

I have a copy of the Greenwich map and so far everyone I’ve showed it to has been blown away.

You can buy paper copies of the maps, but also view them in full detail online.

Link to Emotion Map.
Link to Christian Nold’s website.

A new brain scanning study has supported what we’ve suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to.

Neuroscientist Hilke Plassman led a brain-scanning study [pdf], shortly to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where volunteers were asked to taste and rate five different wines, each individually priced.

What the volunteers didn’t know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were tasted twice. One one occasion it was described as costing $90 a bottle, on another as costing $10 a bottle.

The volunteers rated the ‘more expensive’ wine as significantly more likeable despite being identical to the ‘cheaper’ wine.

In addition, the brain scans showed when the volunteers tasted the wine they thought was more expensive, their brains showed increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and its surrounding area, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), both areas of the frontal lobes.

The orbitofrontal cortex is known to be involved in the regulation of emotions and encoding the ‘value’ of experiences. Unsurprisingly, it has been identified as a key area in studies of gambling.

However, it has also been previously found to correlate with ratings of pleasantness of smells, tastes and even music.

Interestingly, there was no difference in the brain areas directly related to experiencing taste, and the researchers suggest that the belief that the wine is more expensive probably doesn’t directly change our sensory experience, but leads us to think that the experience is more ‘valuable’.

The results echo behavioural studies which have found that the same wine is rated differently when served in different quality bottles.

pdf of full-text paper.
Link to write-up from The Times.

Salon has an entertaining review of the new book Describing Inner Experience which is sort of a combination of an argument and a self-consciousness showdown between philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Russell Hurlburt.

Schwitzgebel is sceptical that we can accurately describe our inner thoughts and experiences, while Hurlburt feels that we are capable of doing so, when properly directed.

If you think that it’s obvious we can describe our inner mental states, start by reading the review and you’ll get a flavour of what the problem is.

At the beginning of the book’s central section, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel meet their volunteer. Her pseudonym is Melanie. She is in her 20s, and she has an interest in psychology but no experience in these debates. Hurlburt explains the rules to her: She will simply tell them what was on her mind just before each beep, and they will try to figure out if her reports are accurate.

Hurlburt handles the direct questioning, then turns her over to Schwitzgebel for cross-examination. They have six sessions, each about an hour long. And over the course of these sessions, something unexpected happens, a novelistic twist that is subtle, hilarious and hard to describe. A battle for interpretive credibility emerges, as the doubt Schwitzgebel casts upon Melanie’s self-understanding rebounds upon himself.

The preface and first chapter of the book are freely available online if you want to learn more, and the book itself has just been published.

Link to Salon review.
Link to details of book and sample preface and chapter.