Personality types, as you’ve never seen them before

Someone’s created some satirical descriptions of the personality types classified by the Myers-Briggs personality test, that include categories such as ‘The Egghead’, ‘The Conman’ and ‘The Evil Overlord’.

The Myers-Briggs isn’t used so much by research psychologists, largely because it isn’t as reliable as some of the newer ‘Big Five‘ personality measures which dominate the field.

It is not unusual for people to fill one in themselves though (there are many versions online) and get a rating of whether they are Extroverted or Introverted, Sensing or iNtuitive, Feeling or Thinking, Judging or Perceiving.

Each of these gets compressed into a short letter string, and each is supposed to represent some particular personality type.

This new satirical interpretation of the personality types makes a sly commentary on some of the more outlandish descriptions you can read online.

ESFP: The National Enquirer Headline

An ESFP is a spontaneous, outgoing, charismatic, fun-loving person like the guy you used to room with in college–you know, the one who was found floating face-down in the reservoir with the homecoming queen’s underwear in his teeth.

The strongest element of the psychological makeup of an ESFP is his easygoing, impulsive approach to life. ESFPs often build their careers out of dating supermodels, being involved in scandals, and appearing regularly in such newspapers as “The National Enquirer” and “The Weekly World News.” ESFPs often die in bizarre circumstances, usually involving jealous boyfriends, exotic dancers, escaped pythons, feather boas, and falls from the penthouse floor of high-rise apartments; those who don’t, usually die of veneral diseases.

Link to satirical Myers-Briggs interpretation (via MeFi).
Link to good Wikipedia page on the Myers-Briggs.

‘Self-silencing’ may affect women’s health

The New York Times discusses recent findings suggesting that not expressing feelings during marital arguments is bad for women’s health, but not for men’s.

The article draws on the results of a study that followed over 3,500 people and looked at both the quality of their marriage and whether they developed heart disease.

Interestingly, the overall level of marital satisfaction and total number of disagreements were not related to heart problems.

However, women who “self-silenced” during conflict with their spouse, compared with women who did not, had four times the risk of dying. This was not the case with men.

The tendency to bottle up feelings during a fight is known as self-silencing. For men, it may simply be a calculated but harmless decision to keep the peace. But when women stay quiet, it takes a surprising physical toll.

“When you’re suppressing communication and feelings during conflict with your husband, it’s doing something very negative to your physiology, and in the long term it will affect your health,” said Elaine Eaker, an epidemiologist in Gaithersburg, Md., who was the study’s lead author. “This doesn’t mean women should start throwing plates at their husbands, but there needs to be a safe environment where both spouses can equally communicate.”

Other studies led by Dana Crowley Jack, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., have linked the self-silencing trait to numerous psychological and physical health risks, including depression, eating disorders and heart disease.

Keeping quiet during a fight with a spouse is something “we all have to do sometimes,” Dr. Jack said. “But we worry about the people who do it in a more extreme fashion.”

Nevertheless, men are not without their seemingly gender specific health risks. The study found that men with wives who were upset by work were almost three times more likely to develop heart disease.

The study is another example of how mental and physical health are completely intertwined.

Link to NYT article ‘Marital Spats, Taken to Heart’.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

How the brain generates private thoughts

The Spanish Journal of Psychology has an interesting English language article [pdf] on the neuropsychology of private thoughts – still one of the most mysterious and poorly understood aspects of our mental life.

Neuropsychology is especially good at looking at how differences in brain function relate to objectively observable behaviour. Private thoughts are quite hard to study in this way, because they are essentially subjective.

Sometimes, of course, we make our private thoughts ‘public’ by talking to ourselves, and, it seems, this is something we learn to do during childhood.

Infants seem unable to ‘think to themselves’ and instead ‘talk to themselves‘ when solving problems, usually vocalising the most tricky or novel aspects of the situation. As we grow, we develop the ability to internalise this speech, and can eventually have a purely internal monologue.

Understanding inner speech is also important because it becomes distorted in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.

People with psychosis can experience effects like ‘thought insertion’, where they experience external thoughts being inserted into their stream of consciousness, or ‘thought withdrawal’, where thoughts seem to be removed from the mind.

This suggests that there must be something that the brain uses to identify thoughts as self-generated, and that this perhaps breaks down in psychosis, so we can have the uncanny experience of having thoughts that don’t seem to be our own.

Why we would need this is an interesting question, as surely all thoughts would be our own.

However, the Spanish Journal of Psychology article notes that inner speech often activates areas of the brain also used for ‘outloud speech’, suggesting that it may be a sort of internal action.

Being able to distinguish bodily movements caused by something external (someone moving your arm) and movements caused by our own will is very important, and, perhaps, this is the sort of mechanism that becomes disturbed for what were originally movements, but have become internalised as we ‘think to ourselves’.

pdf of ‘A Neurocognitive Approach to the Study of Private Speech’.
Link to SciAm article on private speech in children.

Illusory motion with waves of almonds

I’ve just found a visual illusion that gives a striking impression of motion from a static image. It’s entitled ‘this picture is not animated’, which, like anything eye-catching on the internet, immediately made me check whether it was or not.

With many of these sorts of illusory motion images, you can ‘stop’ the motion by simplying viewing them through a very small aperture.

Putting a pin through a piece of paper and viewing it through the hole does the trick, but so does making a small viewing hole with your fingers.

As you can see yourself, the picture stops ‘moving’ when viewed like this, but starts again as soon as you view it normally.

This also prevents stars from twinkling when you view them at night. The traditional explanation of ‘star twinkle’ is that the light gets bounced around as it travels through the atmosphere, giving it the twinkling effect.

In fact, by looking at them through a small hole, you’re preventing any effects caused by your eyes moving about.

The fact that the illusion stops moving and the stars stop twinkling when you do this, suggests that the way our eyes scan across the visual scene is an important part of why we see the false movement in these sorts of images.

Because of this, you can ‘speed up’ and ‘slow down’ the false movement in the visual illusions by changing how often you move your eyes.

UPDATE: Thanks to celeriac for posting a link to a scientific paper which explains this effect.

Link to striking movement illusion.

The influencing machine in art and psychosis

The ever-excellent Fortean Times has an article about an exhibition that showed some of the most important works in the history of visionary and psychiatric art which depict the mysterious ‘influencing machine’.

The term was coined by psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk who noted that the delusions of people with schizophrenia often involved them being influenced by a ‘diabolical machine’, just outside the technical understanding of the victim, that influenced them from afar and is operated by a shadowy group of the person’s enemies.

The exhibition is partly drawn from the Prinzhorn Collection, which was started by the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn who collected art work by asylum inpatients.

Unlike his contemporaries, he didn’t assume the interest was solely that the work reflected the mental state of the patient, but collected them for their aesthetic value and, in the process, discovered some amazingly creative artists.

His subsequent book, Artistry of the Mentally, was hugely influential and was an inspiration to Jean Dubuffet, who wanted to capture art as it appears ‘in the raw’, away from the influence of art schools and the art world.

Dubuffet began to collect what he called ‘art brut’ (raw art) and suggested that people who worked outside the art world were ‘outsider artists‘ – to which now whole galleries, magazines and academic conferences are devoted.

The Prinzhorn Collection and the Collection de l’Art Brut are now two of the most important collections in the world.

The Fortean Times article discusses a recent Prinzhorn exhibition that focused purely on the ‘influencing machine’, with some truly spectacular pieces from both mainstream and ‘outsider’ artists.

The exhibition is, appropriately, dominated by the Air Loom, the first known example of an influencing machine, which was detailed in eerily precise technical drawings between 1800 and 1810 by a Welsh tea-merchant named James Tilly Matthews, at that time confined in Bedlam (Bethlem) as an incurable lunatic.

Matthews’s plans showed a machine fuelled by barrels of magnetised gas and ‘putrid effluvia’, and powered by Leyden jars and windmill sails, that wove invisible mesmeric currents which, beamed at a human target by its sinister operators, filled the mind with alien voices and nightmarish visions and could be programmed to convulse, torture and even kill.

In an inspired and classically fortean move, the installation artist and crop circle pioneer Rod Dickinson has turned Matthews’s hallucinatory blueprints into reality. The result is an inscrutable piece that fills the main exhibition floor, towering ominously over the spectator. On one level, it’s a sober and ‘authentic’ assemblage of 18th-century technology, with oak panelling, brass fittings, hooped barrels and tanned leather tubes: a period piece, yet also brand new, as if fresh off the assembly line and poised to hiss and rumble into life.

As an aside, I was inspired by Tausk in a couple of papers I wrote on the interaction between psychosis and the net, where I discussed the appearance of the internet in paranoid delusions as the modern day incarnation of the influencing machine [pdf1, pdf2].

Link to Fortean Times article ‘Shadow of the Air Loom’.

Radio in a coma

A new series of the whimsical comedy series Vent, about the thoughts of a man in a coma, has just begun on Radio 4. It’s darkly comic, surreal and occasionally deeply touching.

It flips between the thoughts and memories of Ben, a man in a coma, and the visits of his friends and family to his unconscious body.

It’s by comedy writer Nigel Smith, who was inspired by his own experiences of falling into coma after suffering a demyelinating brain stem lesion.

Link to audio archive of Vent (full archive in ‘All Vent programmes’ link).

Is the internet good for our mental health?

This week’s ABC Radio National All in the Mind discusses how the internet can affect the mind, whether we can be addicted to it, and how it’s being used to delivered effective psychological therapies for a range of mental disorders.

This is the programme I was interviewed for a few weeks ago (through the magic of editing, I sound quite coherent!) where I mainly discuss why I think the concept of ‘internet addiction’ is nonsense.

The other guests are Dr Nick Titov, Prof Isaac Marks and Dr Stephanie Bauer, who discuss their pioneering work on using computer technology to provide treatment for mental illness.

Isaac Marks is one of the founders of behavioural therapy and has been quite involved in adapting some of the techniques so they can be taught by computer or over the internet. In fact, he’s one of the editors of a new book on computer assisted psychotherapy.

One of the things I plug on the programme is an online cognitive behaviour therapy for depression website called MoodGYM.

It’s one of the great success stories of online therapy. It’s been extensively researched, found to be effective and is free and advert free. Highly recommended.

Link to All in the Mind with audio and transcript.

Boyden blogs on augmenting the brain

Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist who specialises in developing technology to enhance the mind and brain, has just started writing a blog on the Technology Review site.

I had the pleasure of giving a joint session with Ed at the SciFoo conference on ‘clinical problems in neuroscience and practical cognitive augmentation’ where I learnt a great deal about techniques to control brain circuits developed by his research team, both for treating neurological and psychiatric disorders, and to boost normal cognitive function.

In his first blog post he outlines some of the principles and promises of human augmentation, and discusses what sort of impact this is likely to have on our ideas of ‘normal’.

If his work is anything to go by, his blog is going to be well worth reading.

Link to Ed Boyden’s blog at Technology Review (via BrainWaves).
Link to Ed Boyden’s homepage.

Purple haze all in my brain

It’s not often one gets one’s bong in the scientific literature, let alone one designed to allow you to smoke weed inside an MRI scanner, but this is exactly what has been achieved in an article published in the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior.

Most studies on the neuroscience of marijuana have used pills or injections of THC, the main active ingredient, but this is quite different from smoking – both in the way it reaches the brain and because of the fact that burning the plant creates many other chemicals which also get inhaled.

A team from Harvard Medical School are interested in how smoked marijuana affects the brain, but have come to the inevitable conclusion that it’s actually quite hard smoking a joint when you’re lying on your back being brain scanned.

So the research team put their heads together (!), and realised they needed to design a bong – a water pipe for smoking marijuana – safe to use in an MRI scanner.

This isn’t a trivial task. Apart from being free of metal parts that could be affected by the MRI scanner’s strong magnet, the device had to be installed and removed within one booked session and also needed to control the smoke.

As well as allowing the person take hits from the bong, the device also had to capture the smoke that was exhaled. Otherwise, the scanner room would get filled with smoke which could interfere with the equipment and affect any participants who took part in other studies that happened afterwards.

Presumably, after much trial and error, the final device was created with two main parts: the first was a face mask with pipes going to the bong and the ‘exhaust’, the second was the water pipe which was sealed in a box.

One thing you may not be aware of is that the US research agency NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, have standard issue spliffs. These are government approved reefers guaranteed to have a measured amount of THC in them.

The bong was designed so these could be attached to the water pipe and lit at the appropriate time so the participant could smoke while being brain scanned.

The researchers tested their creation with a simple brain scan, declared the project a success and published their MRI-safe bong design in the medical journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior.

Link to write-up of study from Wired.
Link to abstract of article.

2007-09-28 Spike activity

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

TechReview has an article on teaching computers to have meaningful conversations. Presumably, teaching humans is going to be the next step.

Neurons avoid talking to themselves by using 19,000 forms of one gene, reports Ars Technia.

How moving your eyes in a specific way can help you solve a complex problem without even realizing it. An interesting study tackled in an article by OmniBrain and one by Mixing Memory

The Boston News discusses how digital technology gives us an almost permanent and sometimes uncomfortably long surrogate memory.

Neurophilosophy covers a case where a stroke causes a woman to feel sounds.

Happiness is a Warm Electrode. Popular Science magazine discusses deep brain stimulation treatment for severe depression.

Cognitive Daily asks why aren’t there more women in science and maths by looking at three key studies.

The New York Times asks why men are happier than women. Language Log asks why the NYT are overselling the statistics.

PsychCentral picks up on what looks like a great event in NYC: Comedians for suicide prevention.

Law professor Elyn Sacks’ new book on her experience of psychosis is reviewed on PsyBlog.

Treatment Online features a fMRI technique that may help the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

Is it rational to do no harm? The Phineas Gage Fan Club investigates.

Ouroboros reports back from a Cambridge conference on effective therapies for postponing and treating the problems of human ageing.

What influences false recall? Developing Intelligence looks at a recent study which picks apart the processes.

Ambushing brain damage

Nature Reviews Neuroscience has a fascinating article on drugs that remain dormant in the brain and only respond when damage occurs.

They’ve been christened pathologically activated therapeutic (PAT) drugs and rely on the fact that brain damage triggers specific chemical changes and drugs can be designed to take advantage of these processes.

For example, memantine is a type of drug that antagonises (blocks) the NMDA receptor which is activated by the neurotransmitter glutamate.

Important, because this receptor is known to be activated to excess in conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Several drugs block this receptor, including ketamine and PCP (‘Angel dust’), but they block the receptor as soon as they arrive.

Memantine is different – it doesn’t do its job unless the receptor has already been activated or ‘opened’ at least once already – making it a ‘non-competative antagonist’ – in other words, it doesn’t compete with the neurotransmitter, it waits until it’s been and gone.

It’s as if you wanted to prevent postmen from delivery their parcels by bricking up each door, but the householders will only open their door to the postmen.

So you hang around, wait for the postman to call, and then get in the doorway and block it. You’re not fighting the postmen while they deliver the letter, you’re avoiding conflict and taking advantage of what they already do.

This gives memantine a very important property. It blocks more receptors the more glutamate is about, or to return to our analogy, it can block more doors when there are more postmen about.

This means the drug ‘lies in wait’. As more NMDA receptors are activated owing to Alzheimer’s disease, the more it steps in to calm the situation down and prevent constant activation which is what is thought to cause the most damage.

The article outlines several other neurochemical processes that allow drugs to seemingly ‘lie in wait’ and only react to damage, rather than affecting the brain regardless of what else is happening.

It’s an interesting, clever and potentially very important twist on drug design that takes advantage of our growing knowledge of how the brain works in both illness and health.

Link to abstract of scientific paper.

APA military mental health special

The latest edition of the American Psychological Association’s monthly magazine has a special feature on military mental health.

The issue is timely, as mental illness in the US military is at an all time high and military mental health services were recently described as “woefully inadequate” by a Pentagon task force.

It’s a bit of a curious mix for a magazine that’s usually heavily academic: it serves as a description of the problem, some motivational material to encourage psychologists to work in military mental health, and a collection of heart-warming tales of success.

There is certainly a great need for psychologists to help treat with psychiatric disorder in veterans, especially now increased government funding has been made available.

However, one wonders whether this issue is also a way of the APA executive mending relationships with the military after the membership voted to condemn the majority of their interrogation practices as torture.

Either way, it’s an interesting peek into the coming wave of mental health care changes that have been initiated by the large numbers of psychiatric casualties coming back from Iraq.

Curiously, the web page of the special feature has an interesting Freudian slip.

It’s been erroneously titled “Serving those we serve”, rather than its presumably correct title, given in the table of contents, of “Serving those who serve”.

Link to special feature on military mental health.

Daniel Kahneman ‘masterclass’ online

Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman recently gave a two day masterclass on his work. It’s now been made available on Edge as transcripts and video clips.

Kahneman has done a huge amount of work on cognitive biases – the quirks of mind that make us deviate from rationality, sometimes in quite surprising and interesting ways.

For example, with his colleague Amos Tversky, he discovered the availability heuristic, which is the process by which we tend to judge an event as more likely to happen in the future the more easily it can be brought to mind.

This is why we vastly overestimate the chances of vividly spectacular but unlikely things like terrorism, but underestimate the mundane but consistently lethal things like driving.

Kahneman has been involved in identifying many of these sorts of biases, and cleverly, applying them to economic decision making to inform economic models of financial behaviour.

As a result, experimental psychology is now a key part of economics to understand how people actually behave as opposed to earlier models which assumed that people will always act more-or-less rationally to maximise their profits.

The Edge ‘masterclass’ is quite a comprehensive guide to his work and covers work which has been influential in many areas of psychology.

Link to Edge Daniel Kahneman ‘masterclass’.

The false progression of Louis Wain

The five pictures are by Victorian artist Louis Wain who painted cats through the whole of his life and continued through periods of intense psychosis.

Almost every article on Wain uses them to demonstrate the progression of schizophrenia but the evidence for them being painted in chronological order is actually quite weak.

The five pictures are from an original series of eight which were collected by Dr Walter Maclay who was interested in the effect of mental illness on art.

However, the pictures were undated and, as Rodney Dale notes in his biography of Wain (Louis Wain: The Man Who Painted Cats; ISBN 1854790986), “with no evidence of the order of their progression, Maclay arranged them in a sequence which clearly demonstrated, he thought, the progressive deterioration of the artist’s mental abilities.”

In fact, his later works are for the most part conventional cat pictures in his normal style, with the occasional ‘psychedelic’ example produced at the same time – where he experimented with what he called ‘wallpaper patterns’.

However, the increasing abstraction over time is likely to be a myth. Wain’s biography again:

Assembling what little factual knowledge we have on Dr Maclay’s paintings, there is clear no justification for regarding them as more than samples of Louis Wain’s art at different times. Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] ‘later’ productions which are patterns rather than cats. All of which is to say no more than that the eight paintings were done at different times, which could be said of eight paintings by any artist!

Link to Wikipedia page on Louis Wain.
Link to online gallery of Wain pictures.

Olivers Sacks on music, drugs and emotion

Wired magazine has an interview with Oliver Sacks where he talks about cases from his forthcoming book on the neurology of music, and his own drug-induced experiences of seeing non-existent colours while listening to Monteverdi.

Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, “I want to see indigo, now!” As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall ‚Äî the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.

Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi’s mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, “Good, the color exists in the external world.” But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo ‚Äî they were blue, mauve, pink. I’ve never seen that color since.

The interview is a glimpse of what his next book will contain, and also relates a case of a man with Alzheimer’s and severe memory impairment who can nonetheless take part in an acapella singing group. Seemingly his musical abilities survived his amnesia, not unlike Clive Wearing, who we discussed recently on Mind Hacks.

Link to Wired interview with Oliver Sacks.

Who killed the NYT psychology section?

The New York Times has a record of publishing some cutting edge mind and brain journalism, most of which was collected on their ‘Mental Health and Behavior’ page. However, the page seems to have ground to a halt, removing one of the best psychology resources from the net.

Actually, they’ve not stopped publishing high-quality psychology articles, as the recent piece on the genetics of moral behaviour and social altruism demonstrates.

But their single best advert for their articles, a one-stop shop that gathered them all in one place, seems to have died a death.

It’s such as shame for a publication that has the rare and enviable record of publishing engaging pieces by writers who actually understand the science.

Link to moribund ‘Mental Health and Behavior’ page (thanks Jeremy!).
Link to excellent piece on genetics and moral behaviour.