2007-12-07 Spike activity

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

Chewing gum and context-dependent memory: The independent roles of chewing gum and mint flavour. A paper currently ‘in press’ for the British Journal of Psychology.

Sharp Brains has an interview with Prof Robert Emmons, a psychologist who studies gratitude.

In light of the recent UK case of a supposedly dead man who turned up claiming he couldn’t remember the last five years of his life (now under arrest for fraud!) the BBC has an article on why men go missing, and neuropsychologist Dr Eli Jaldow discusses whether this type of amnesia is likely, in The Times.

PsyBlog starts a fascinating series on the unconscious.

A fantastic ‘turning tables’ visual illusion is discovered by Living the Scientific Life

Science News reports on a new theory on the neuroscience of the organisation of thinking. Abstract of scientific paper here.

The influence of eye disorders on the development of impressionist art is discussed by Neurophilosophy

How America Lost the War on Drugs: a fantastic Rolling Stone article on how billions were spent in a futile attempt to stop people taking drugs.

Frontal Cortex looks at a possible link between business acumen and dyslexia.

Partial Recall: Why Memory Fades with Age. Scientific American looks at the neuroscience behind memory decline in normal ageing.

Guantanamo detainee attempts suicide by slashing himself with a sharpened fingernail. When will these terrorists acts of asymmetric warfare cease?

Cognitive Daily looks at kids’ misconceptions about numbers – and how they fix them.

Which brain hemisphere falls asleep first?

The abstract of a fascinating 1995 review paper by Maria Casagrande and colleagues which gathered experimental data together to try and work out which of the brain’s cortical hemispheres falls asleep first.

It turns out, it’s the left.

Which hemisphere falls asleep first?

Neuropsychologia, 33(7), 815-22.

Casagrande M, Violani C, De Gennaro L, Braibanti P, Bertini M.

Behavioral tasks (reaction times to acoustic stimuli and finger tapping tasks) performed by normal subjects when sleepy or attempting to fall asleep have been used as indices of hemispheric asymmetries during the sleep onset period. Results show a stronger impairment of the left hemisphere (right hand) both in reacting to external stimuli and in sustaining endogenous motor programs. The left hemisphere seems to fall asleep earlier than the right hemisphere.

Link to abstract of scientific paper.

Almost perfect

The New York Times has a short article on mental health and perfectionism, the tendency to measure success and self-worth by the completion of often unrealistic goals.

Over the last two decades this concept is being increasingly seen as a core component in some types of types of depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive and eating disorders.

A recent study identified several key features of perfectionism as, primarily, excessive concern over making mistakes, with other influences including high personal standards, the perception of high expectations and criticism from parents, doubting of the quality of your own actions, and a preference for order and organisation.

One of the key papers [pdf] in the field that really cemented the idea of perfectionism as an important psychological idea, suggested perfectionism could be focused inward (stringently evaluating and censuring your own behaviour), other-oriented perfectionism (having unrealistic standards for other people) and socially prescribed perfectionism (living up to unrealistic standards which the person perceives others are setting).

For people who already have negative ideas about themselves, perfectionism is thought to work like a constant test. If you can prove to yourself you can pass the test, you feel like a good person.

However, if the standards are unrealistic, you’re always going to fail, and ironically, concern and anxiety about achieving these high standards can actually lead to putting things off, or doing the tasks worse.

This can lead to a vicious circle where people feel their emotional well-being is dependent on them reaching impossible goals, but trying to reach the goal makes them feel even worse.

One of the difficult things in psychological treatment, is often trying to persuade people that performing worse is actually a good thing. ‘Good enough’ rather than ‘perfect’.

Link to NYT article on perfectionism.
pdf of key paper ‘Perfectionism in the Self and Social Contexts’.

Fighting over font-change semantics

Philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote a damning review of Steven Pinker’s new book, ‘The Stuff of Thought’, for Nature and it’s caused a bit of a rumble.

One particular highlight was that she described a theory from Pinker’s book, that suggests that language and thought can refer to meaning in a similar way, as:

…about as applicable to real meaning as ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ is to real life. Aptly ridiculed by critics as ‘font-change semantics’, the theory still has its disciples. Including Steven Pinker.

Apart from showing a woeful misunderstanding of Dungeons and Dragons, Churchland also failed to notice that Pinker had never proposed this theory in his book. In fact, his book argues against it.

In this week’s Nature, psychologist Marc Hauser writes in to say Churchland doesn’t seem to have read the book, and Pinker comes back with his own rebuke:

The book apparently stimulated the reviewer to free-associate to her own beliefs that psychological phenomena can be explained at the level of neurons and that human thinking is in the service of motor control. The fact that I (like most cognitive psychologists) have not signed up to these views is the only point of contact between my book and her review.

While definitely being more entertaining than your average book review , it doesn’t even come close to matching the slanging match between Hans Eyesenck and Stephen Jay Gould, where they ending up arguing over the ‘relative exposure of our respective arses’ in The New York Review of Books.

Sleeping and dreaming

London’s newest science museum, the Wellcome Collection, has just kicked off what looks to be a fantastic exhibition on the art and science of sleeping and dreaming.

It runs until March 2008 and aims to illustrate how we’ve understood sleep through the ages, as well as the contemporary science of this still mysterious state.

If you can’t make it in person, there’s an online taster that contains a collection of striking images from the exhibition with some brief commentary.

The exhibition also has free guided expert-led tours, including ones by sleep researcher Dr Mary Morrell on December 19th, and one by sleep doctor Dr Neil Stanley on January 17th.

Other tours are guided by science journalists and some of the exhibited artists.

Link to exhibition details.
Link to online ‘taster’ exhibition.

Full disclosure: I’ve received grant funding from the Wellcome Trust for a science art collaboration and I am an occasional paid reviewer for their Arts Awards. As far as I know though, neither are connected with this exhibition.

Pavlov and Brian Wilson redux

Ivan Pavlov and Brian Wilson – together at last! This rather unlikely combination seemed to spark a bit of interest, so here is a brief collection of your contributions.

Thanks to Lloyd for sending in one of Mark Stivers’ hilarious cartoons that gives an interesting twist on Pavlov’s experiments. Click for the larger version.

Jesse mentioned a clip from The Office that depicts a wonderful demonstration of classical conditioning, as used when trying to annoy your coworkers.

On a Brian Wilson tip, Simon notes that “While insane, Brian Wilson recorded an album called “Sweet Insanity” with [psychologist] Eugene Landy as co-producer, but his label rejected it. WFMU’s blog has a most delightfully terrifying track from said album.”

Brian Wilson rapping. Indeed truly terrifying.

Distinctly less terrifying is Aimee Mann’s recent track, ‘Pavlov’s Bell’, which also references the work of the bearded Russian dog harasser.

Ring a bell and I’ll salivate

A funny clip from That 70s Show where Michael provides a unique interpretation of Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning in an attempt to help Eric with his women problems.

This is not the first time that Pavlov has been invoked as a metaphor in popular culture.

The Barenaked Ladies track, ‘Brian Wilson’, has the following verse:

It’s a matter of instinct, it’s a matter of conditioning,
It’s a matter of fact.
You can call me Pavlov’s dog
Ring a bell and I’ll salivate – how’d you like that?
Dr Landy tell me you’re not just a pedagogue,
cause right now I’m

Lying in bed just like Brian Wilson did…

The Dr Landy referred to in the lyrics was controversial psychologist Eugene Landy, who attempted to ‘treat’ Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson’s mental difficulties (including a not inconsiderable psychosis) by taking control of his career, musical output and other substantial parts of his life.

Unsurprisingly, legal action was eventually taken against Landy and he gave up his license to practice in California.

Link to That 70s Show clip.
Link to obituary of Eugene Landy.

Harnessing the brain’s power to reorganise after injury

The online Dana magazine Cerebrum has a great article on neurorehabilitation – the art and science of helping someone to recover from brain injury both by harnessing the brain’s natural ability to adapt, and by teaching the injured person new skills and abilities.

The article discuss both rehabilitation medicine, the practice of training patients to adapt and improve, and the neuroscience techniques which are being developed to try and tackle the problem at the cellular level.

One of the key processes which science is trying to understand and optimise is ‘neuroplasticity‘, the process by which the brain makes new connections, reorganises and routes around damage.

The article sets out six key questions for neuroscience that, when answered, should revolutionise who we can treat brain injury:

1. Since so much of what we think we know about regeneration is derived from experiments on immature nerve cells, are the mechanisms of regeneration in the injured mature nervous system the same as those that apply to the developing embryonic nervous system?

2. Since the vast majority of experiments in regeneration of nerve pathways have been done in rats and mice, how predictive are these experiments for results in human patients? Apart from molecular differences, rodents are much smaller than we are. Nerve fibers may have to regenerate much farther in humans in order to achieve the same level of reconnection that underlies functional improvement in smaller animals.

3. Even if sufficient nerve regeneration can be achieved, will the connections made be specific enough to underlie real function?

4. How helpful are stem cells? Can they survive after transplantation into the human spinal cord or will they be rejected? Can they replace damaged neurons or will they serve only as sources of chemical substances that support survival and growth of the brain’s own nerve cells?

5. Will we be able to identify a single approach that is so fundamental that it can yield dramatic improvements in recovery from brain injury, or will we need to develop a cocktail approach, using multiple treatments simultaneously?

6. Will approaches that enhance regeneration in one circumstance, for example spinal cord injury, also work in other situations, such as stroke or traumatic brain injury?

On a related note, Sharp Brains has picked up on the fact that American TV channel PBS will shortly be broadcasting a special on brain fitness and neuroplasticity.

It’ll probably focus on normal ageing and brain fitness rather than brain injury, but hopefully should tackle some of the neuroscience behind brain changes in general.

There’s a trailer available online.

Link to article ‘Harnessing the Brain’s Power to Adapt After Injury’.
Link to Sharp Brains on PBS neuroplasticity programme.

War, social networks and ethical minefields

Wired has an article in its latest edition that discusses why understanding human networks are becoming key to the US Military’s mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the article seems to do little more than uncritically echo military enthusiasm for this new approach while telling us little about the actual science behind the techniques.

But the most interesting story is not the strategy itself, which is hardly new, but how it is causing a rift among anthropologists to the point where conference speakers have been heckled and left in tears for their participation.

The debate centres on the US Military’s Human Terrain System, a project that aims to understand the culture, society and social networks in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a view to using this information to further military objectives.

In contrast, the NYT managed to do a brief but considerably more balanced article and video segment on the project last May, noting that the crux of the matter is that the project has employed numerous anthropologists, as anthropology now plays a key role in US military strategy.

Concerns centre over whether co-operating with the military violates the strict codes of ethics that compels anthropologists to ‘do no harm’ to the cultures they are studying, and to ask for informed consent from the people that are observing to make them fully aware of the purpose of the research.

Critics believe that aiding a military occupation is unethical, as it will inevitably lead to deaths prompted by the intelligence they provide, and requires a level of secrecy – violating both of the ‘do no harm’ and ‘informed consent’ principles.

This has caused an angry rift with accusations of ‘mercenary anthropology’ and, in an interesting parallel to the ethical dilemmas faced by the American Psychological Association, the American Anthropological Association has been forced to issue a report and statement on the issue; disapproving of the project while refusing to ban its members from participating.

Last Thursday, at a panel session on the issue at the American Anthropological Association conference, Zenia Helbig, an ex-Human Terrain System researcher, cried when she was heckled by the audience.

Wired describes the scene as ‘ugly’ and quotes Helbig as implying the hecklers were being driven by conspiracy theories, while Inside Higher Education gives a more nuanced account, suggesting audience reactions were mixed.

The overarching issue is that the military has cottoned-on to the fact that its in-house ‘psyops’ services are inadequate for the complexity of new forms of warfare, and are seeking the collaboration of academic disciplines which have been founded on principles of non-coercion.

The debate essentially centres around whether these principles should be universally applied to all people, or whether they are trumped by loyalty to the national interests of a researcher’s country.

Link to NYT article ‘Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones’.
Link to abstract of Human Terrain System paper.
Link to Inside Higher Ed article on panel discussion.

Encephalon 37 arrives

The 37th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just pulled into town and is hosted on A Blog Around the Clock.

A couple of my favourites include a post on whether smiling actually makes you feel better, and one on some of the hidden motivators for our voting behaviour.

There’s much more great mind and brain writing in the mix (including a raft of new student writers), so have a browse and see what catches your eye.

Link to Encephalon 37.

SciAmMind on Smart Kids, Sex Bias and Psychopaths

The latest Scientific American has just hit the shelves and two of the feature articles are available online: one with tips for raising hard-working and motivated children from developmental psychology research, and another on whether neuropsychology helps us understand the gender bias in fields like maths and physics.

However, there is another, stand out article on psychopaths that describes what the term actually means in psychology.

It’s something that’s commonly but wrongly confused with psychosis, largely because they’re both unfortunately shortened to ‘psycho’, despite them being completely different.

This month, the articles in the print edition look particularly good. They cover everything from people who want to be amputees, to the psychology of terrorism, to psychedelic drug therapy, to phantom limbs and more.

Link to article on raising smart kids.
Link to article on gender and scientific achievement.
Link to article on psychopaths.

No eye deer – an amazing brain injury

Retrospectacle has found an amazing case of a five year-old boy who impaled his left frontal lobe on a deer antler after he tripped and fell while carrying it.

The business end of the antler (which was thankfully no longer attached to a deer) went through his eye socket and into his brain.

Luckily, the young lad made a full recovery with no loss of eyesight and no long term brain damage.

Brains of children (particularly those under the age of 8) can make recoveries from injuries that would be much more serious in adults.

This is because young brains are still very ‘plastic’. In other words, they are still growing and re-shaping.

These recoveries can sometimes be quite astonishing. For example, as we’ve reported previously, some young kids can make a full recovery even when they’ve had half their cortex removed.

Interestingly, this child’s injury from the deer antler is similar to an ‘ice pick lobotomy’, detailed in a fantastic Neurophilosophy article.

One difference, however, is while both the ice pick and the deer antler have entered the brain the same way, the ice pick would be moved side to side to cause damage over a much wider area.

Link to Retrospectacle on amazing deer antler injury.

How to Good-Bye Depression

It’s rare than someone comes up with a truly novel treatment for mental illness, but Hiroyuki Nishigaki’s book may be a genuinely original contribution to the field.

It’s entitled How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

Needless to say, it’s contribution to psychiatry is only equalled by its contribution to the development of the English language.

The description of the book is a wonderful read in itself and the reviews are absolutely priceless.

I feel better already.

Link to book details on Amazon.

In search of evidence-based bullshit

Monday morning is not the best time to be told to ‘bridge the quality chasm’ and ‘identify your value stream’. I was having the misfortune of starting my week with a talk that introduced new health-service management ideas based on psychological sounding ideas such as ‘lean thinking’ and ‘connected leadership’.

Now, I’ve got no problem with things sounding like bullshit, as long as they work. After all, medicine is one of the few places where you can get away with calling the practice of squirting cold water in the ear ‘vestibular caloric stimulation’.

No-one minds that much, because it’s been very well researched and is known to have a profound, albeit temporary, effect on a number of neurological conditions.

So if I wanted to find out whether any of these new management techniques made an organisation more efficient, the first thing I’d do is find out what the research says.

In health and medicine, the ‘gold standard’ for finding our whether an intervention has an effect is the randomised controlled trial or RCT.

It’s a simple but powerful idea. You get a group of people you want to study. You measure them at the beginning. You randomly assign them to two groups. One gets the intervention, the other doesn’t. You measure them at the end. If your intervention has worked, one group should be different when compared to the others.

Of course, it gets a bit more complex in places. Making the comparison fair and deciding what should be measured can be tricky, but it’s still a useful tool.

After my traumatic Monday morning experience I went to see what randomized controlled trials had been done on management techniques.

To my surprise, I found none. Not a single RCT in any of the business psychology literature.

Now, this may be because I know little about organisational psychology, and literature searches are as much about knowing the key words as knowing what you want. So maybe RCTs are called something completely different, or I’m just looking in the wrong places.

So, if you know of any RCTs done on leadership and management techniques, please let me know, I’d be fascinated to find out.

I could completely wrong, but if I’m not, I want to know why are there no randomised-controlled trials in organisational psychology?

And as a corollary, are we spending millions on organisational interventions to supposedly help patients that have been tested no further than the pseudoscience we reject for every other area of medicine?

UPDATE: Some interesting comments from organisational psychologist Stefan Shipman:

It may be that the complexity lies in that organizational research is always secondary to doing business. I can remember in some of my early research that I attempted to implement a new human resources program in one department. The program was successful in its early stages and was (despite my suggestions) implemented company wide.

I think your post absolutely speaks to the frustration of all organizational psychologists because the zeal of organizations to find “new” ways of doing business that are hopefully more effective. This zeal often reduces the “completeness” of research. As organizational psychologists we accept the conditions under which real world research can be done. We encourage the assignment of conditions but accept that some ideas or programs might “leak” into other parts of the organization.

Lies, lesions and medical mysteries

Hysteria, or conversion disorder as it is now known, is when neurological symptoms such as blindness or paralysis are present but no neurological problems or brain abnormalities can be found.

The issue of whether such patients are ‘faking’, whether the neurological abnormality just hasn’t been found yet, or whether the problem is best understood in psychological terms, has been vexing clinicians for the best part of 200 years.

This is a fascinating quote from the introduction to Contemporary Approaches to Study of Hysteria (ISBN 019263254X) by Halligan, Bass and Marshall:

…how can we discover if someone is indeed faking it? (We use ordinary language here rather than the more obviously psychiatric terms such as factitious disorder and malingering: clarity and logic are best served by calling a spade a spade.) The simple but totally impractical solution would be 24-hour surveillance on audio- and video-tape unbeknownst to the patient. Anyone who behaved perfectly normally when alone but who invariably developed the ‘disability’ when in company might be plausibly thought to be feigning.

Short of this Big Brother solution, investigators have tried to devise catch-trials and catch-tests to detect the cheater. For example, it is sometimes assumed that a patient who ‘guesses’ a randomized stimulus sequence (touch, touch, no touch…) significantly below chance must be faking it.

But the existence of such phenomena such as blindsight, unfeeling touch, unconscious perception in visual-spatial neglect and priming in amnesia show how misleading it can be to assume that odd relationships between behaviour and verbal report necessarily constitute evidence of cheating.

We do not impinge on the honesty of patients who perform visual discriminations at above chance level while claiming to have seen nothing. Why should we perforce distrust those who score below chance? In short, the detection of lying in the neurology clinic is at least as difficult as it is in a court of law.

Link to book details.
Link to previous Mind Hacks article on hysteria.
Link to great NYT article on hysteria.

2007-11-30 Spike activity

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

The Washington Post has an article on the ongoing trial using MDMA (‘Ecstasy’) assisted psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Babies learn how to make social evaluations in the first few years of life, according to a new study reported by BBC News.

The Guardian has an article on combining a high-flying career with ongoing mental illness.

For men the brain activation in the ventral striatum is dependent not only on the size of reward, but also how it compares to other people’s rewards.

Google in your brain? PageRank as a semantic memory model: Developing Intelligence examines an interesting view on memory for facts.

Is the beauty of a sculpture in the brain of the beholder? Stupid headline, interesting study.

A great post from Mixing Memory on a favourite experiment: research on schema (like mental frameworks) for memory.

Is the famous Christian poem ‘Footprints’ a case of cryptomnesia: the unconscious copying of another creative work? Rachel Aviv for the Poetry Foundation investigates.

Cognitive economics comes to the aid of football goalkeepers, via the BPS Research Digest.

The University of Virginia has a great ‘Psychedelic Sixties‘ online exhibit.

Neurophilosophy finds a wonderful image generated from a supercomputer simulation of brain microcircuitry.

The Dana Foundation has an excerpt from Sandra and Matthew Blakesee’s new book ‘The Body Has a Mind of Its Own’ available online.

Are rocks conscious? Arguing no is harder than you think, and the New York Times covers controversy.

Probably one of the most important emerging fields in biology is epigenetics. Corpus Callosum tackles a new study on the epigenetic transmission of PTSD risk markers.