Polish psychologists ordered to assess Tinky Winky

A Polish government minister has ordered psychologists to investigate whether BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes homosexuality in children.

Yes, you read that right the first time.

Here’s some of the story from BBC News:

The spokesperson for children’s rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head.

“I noticed he was carrying a woman’s handbag,” she told a magazine. “At first, I didn’t realise he was a boy.”

…

Ms Sowinska wants the psychologists to make a recommendation about whether the children’s show should be broadcast on public television.

A 2004 study on the accessibility of mental health services in Poland found that the interval between being first assessed and getting mental health care was 12 weeks – much longer than all other European centres in previous studies.

A study on work difficulties in Poland published in 2006 found that mental and behavioural disorders were among the main causes of early inability to work.

And the government is ordering psychologists to assess Tinky Winky. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

Link to BBC News story.

The state of commercial neuroscience

NeuroInsights have released a report on the neurotechnology industry that uncovers the growing market for brain-based goods and services.

The 350 page report will set you back $4,500 (that’s almost $13 dollars a page!), but has been summarised by Zack Lynch, the company’s managing director, on his blog.

Some of the highlights include:

2006 venture capital investment in neurotechnology rose 7.5% to $1.666 billion

Neurotech industry revenues rose 10% in 2006 to $120.5 billion; this includes neuropharmaceutical revenues of $101 billion, neurodevice revenues of $4.5 billion, neurodiagnostic revenues of $15 billion

The Neurotech Index of publicly-traded neurotechnology companies was up 53% from its December 31, 2003 conception to March 31, 2006, outpacing the NASDAQ Biotech Index which gained 7% during the same period

In other words, the brain is big money, and it’s only likely to get bigger.

Needless to say, this makes us, the brain-owning public, equally blessed and cursed.

Commercial companies want us to spend our money on their products, meaning as well as developing technologies, they are likely to promote new ideas of well-being or ill-health to motivate us to use them.

This also tends to mean that problems faced by those with money (i.e. people in developed countries) get priority over the problems more typical of less developed countries.

So, treaments for diseases endemic in the developing world, like sleeping sickness, caused by trypanosoma infection and leading to brain disorder and eventual death, will likely be slow in coming.

However, we can be sure that some new advances in commercial neuroscience will be of huge benefit to many people.

The difficulty for us, and the investors, is that sometimes it is only clear which of the advances is significant with the benefit of hindsight.

Link to NeuroInsights industry report with free executive summary.
Link to Zack Lynch’s summary and comments.

Brain patch

An artist on Etsy is selling this wonderful iron-on brain patch based on an antique anatomical illustration.

For only $5 plus packing, you can get one of these delivered to your door and attached to, well, whatever you’d want a beautiful brain illustration attached to.

And if you can’t think of any reason you’d want a iron on brain patch, go see the drawing in more detail.

The cortex has obviously been subject to a little ‘artist license’, but it’s still a striking image.

Link to vintage medical anatomy illustration of the head and brain fabric patch.

Setting yourself back 30 years with hypnosis

Celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna on BBC Radio 4’s music programme, Desert Island Discs:

“When you hear a song, back in say the 70s, the first time you heard it, it sounded absolutely fantastic and it’ll never sound like that again. So, I age regressed myself – I know this sounds a little unusual – and took myself back and then whacked on Sister Sledge, and it just sounded phenomenal. It sounded like it did years ago. It was fresh, with those amazing big disco drums…”

Paul McKenna, confusing the sound of drums with the sound of serious hypnosis researchers banging their heads against the wall.

Broadcasting from the silent land

If you’ve got half an hour, you could do a lot worse than spending it listening to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind interview with neuropsychologist Dr Paul Broks, author of Into the Silent Land (ISBN 1843540347).

Broks writes in a part philosophical, part hallucinatory style, focusing on patients whose understanding and experience of the self has been disturbed by brain injury.

It’s one of my favourite books on neuropsychology, and Broks touches on many of its themes in the interview.

Broks has also written the play On Ego (ISBN 184002609X), which was based on part of the book, but which I found a little luke warm when I saw it and seemed to lack the originality of his writing.

However, he notes in the interview that he’s currently writing another play with the Royal Shakespeare Company about a woman who has intense religious experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy (the two often co-occur), which sounds immensely promising.

Broks will also be appearing at three events at the Sydney Writer’s Festival (two of which are free) so wander along if you happen to be in Sydney on May 31st or June 2nd.

Link to AITM interview with Paul Broks.

Guide to Psychology Blogs

PsyBlog has just published the first part of a guide to online psychology and neuroscience blogs, and says some jolly nice things about Mind Hacks in the process.

PsyBlog author Jeremy also highlights a few more of the many good online reads, but is too modest to mention himself, so I thought I’d pitch in an redress the balance.

Go see PsyBlog, it certainly deserves to be on the list.

Link to PsyBlog Guide to Psychology Blogs – Part 1.

Inkling on Human Nature

I’ve just discovered online science mag Inkling Magazine and noticed that their Human Nature section is full of great mind and brain articles.

Recent articles cover the safety of antidepressants for teenagers, the health risks of love and a brief interview with neuroscientist, author and stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor.

There’s a whole stack more, so have a browse and see what lights your candle.

Link to Inkling’s ‘Human Nature’ articles.

Down the barrel of a nail gun

The ANZ Journal of Surgery just published the summary of a conference paper describing 12 patients with head injuries caused by nail guns. It makes for some surprising reading.

You might think brain injuries from nail guns would be rare, but there are a startling number of case studies in the medical literature.

A recent review of suicide attempts by nail gun noted it was unusual, but this new case series suggests that many of this type of brain injury are caused in this way.

In fact, out of the 12 cases, three quarters were attempting to kill themselves.

Mostly, the cases concern a single nail, but one case was particularly extreme:

The other case involved a staggering 24 nails of 5cm length and represents the largest number of intra-cranial nails in a surviving patient.

This beats the previous record of 12 nails, held by a man reported in a case study from a neurosurgery team in Portland, Oregon.

The picture is the X-ray of Isidro Mejia, who survived a nail gun accident in 2004, where he was unfortunate enough to have four nails embedded in his skull and two in his neck.

Removal of a nail often involves a craniotomy, where the surgeons have to cut around the bit of skull where the nail is embedded, and remove it in one piece.

There are some images of this operation in an article from the Spanish language neurosurgery journal Neurocirugía which is available online as a pdf.

Link to abstract of nail gun head injury case series.
pdf of Spanish language case report of neurosurgical nail removal.

Skywalker: personality disordered or misunderstood?

Wired has picked up on the annual ‘psychiatrists diagnose fictional character’ story by noting that researchers have diagnosed Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, with borderline personality disorder. But is he genuinely disordered or just misunderstood?

The diagnosis of personality disorder describes someone who is consistently emotionally unstable, impulsive and has difficulty forming stable relationships, often seeming aggressive and lacking in self-control.

Borderline personality disorder or BPD is a subtype, particularly characterised by feelings of emptiness and unstable identity, suicide and self-harm, extreme and fluctuating views of others, and occasional paranoid thinking.

In 1988 two psychiatrists published an influential study that questioned the diagnosis of personality disorder, suggesting it was just a label for patients that psychiatrists didn’t like.

Lewis and Appleby gave a group of psychiatrists a number of clinical case studies, and asked them to rate their attitudes towards the patients, and say how they would treat them.

All the psychiatrists were given the same descriptions, except that some included an additional piece of information: that the patient had been given an earlier diagnosis of personality disorder.

This simple piece of information led the patients to be rated as less deserving of care, more difficult, manipulative, attention-seeking, annoying, and more in control of their suicidal urges and debts.

The authors of the study concluded that personality disorder “appears to be an enduring pejorative judgement rather than a clinical diagnosis. It is proposed that the concept be abandoned”.

Although widely used, the diagnosis is still controversial, with some researchers arguing it is a useful and important classification, although admitting there’s still plenty of work to be done.

So does Anakin Skywalker have borderline personality disorder? He probably fulfils the diagnostic criteria.

But the questions should really be ‘does the diagnosis do anything except express our dislike for him?’ and ‘will medicalising his problems help him to improve his life?’.

Link to Wired article on diagnosing Anakin Skywalker (via OmniBrain).

2007-05-25 Spike activity

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

The BPS Research Digest reports on yet another study on the cognitive benefits of meditation.

CrimePsychBlog picks up on an interesting study on the etiology of the psychopathic serial killer.

Core cognitive ability is mostly developed before adolescence, reports SciAm.

Accidental Mind has some illustrated brain notecards to download.

ABC Radio National’s Health Report has a special on Alzheimer’s disease, testosterone and the ageing brain.

Developing Intelligence investigates the neural basis of planning abilities.

The use of oxygen just after a stroke may actually harm the brain rather than help it, suggests a new study reported in SciAm.

Companies tune in to the potential of sound for marketing, reports The Economist.

A couple of interesting news stories on the treatment of mental illness in the US military are picked up by Corpus Callosum.

Wired report on new commercial prototypes for ‘home use’ magnetic brain stimulators.

A perceptual deficiency may make us better foragers, suggests research expertly covered by Cognitive Daily.

SciAm investigates the effects of having half the brain surgically removed.

Narrative self, split brain

If you liked our recent post on what the stories of our lives say about us, Philosophy Now has an article on how the self might be based on our ability to create narratives.

The article looks at how the self has been related to our ability to make narratives out of the disconnected events in our lives, and particularly focuses on the theories of philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur.

MacIntyre emphasises that the concept of personal identity is not only logically dependent upon the concept of a narrative, but it’s also the other way round. In other words it is meaningless to talk about a character biography unless one presupposes that its subject has a personal identity. The biography must be about a continually-existing thing. Conversely, it is pointless, meaningless, to state that some being has a personal identity through time, and at the same time deny that this being has a possible biography.

…

[In Ricoeur’s theory] narratives, or more precisely plots, synthesise reality. A plot fuses together intentions, causal relations, and chance occurrences in a unified sequence of actions and events. Ricoeur seems to think that the plot creates a unified pattern in a chaotic series of events, ties them together, making them meaningful wholes.

This idea has also been taken up by more cognitive science-oriented philosophers, most notably, Daniel Dennett.

In his paper ‘The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’, Dennett argues that the main function of consciousness is to generate a sense of narrative for our experiences.

He references experiments on ‘split-brain‘ patients, whose cortical hemisphere’s cannot directly communicate because their main link, the corpus callosum, has been severed.

In some situations, these patients seem to show a self which isn’t a unified whole, where some knowledge and experience is accessible to some parts (like perception) but not others (like speech).

Despite these obvious divisions, the patients report that they still feel like an apparently unified “sole inhabitant” of the body, as if their narrative is maintained.

Link to Philosophy Now article ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’.
Link to Dennett’s article ‘The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity’.

Confronting suicide on campus and online

Two articles published yesterday examine youth suicide by focusing on the increasing number of suicides among US college students and how Korean authorities are trying to crack down on suicide websites and online pacts.

An article in the The LA Times examined how student suicides are leading people to question the adequacy of campus mental health services.

The student years often put a particular strain on mental health.

Because of existing support, many people are now able to attend university that would have never gone before because their mental disorder couldn’t be adequately managed.

However, the transition to university life can put additional strain on some people, and the late teens and early twenties are when most mental health problems emerge, even for people who don’t attend college.

The New York Times article investigates how suicidal young people in South Korea are using the web to trade tips and organise suicide pacts.

As part of a wider suicide prevention plan, The Korean authorites are now trying to crack down on these websites in a bid to stop young people encouraging each other’s suicidial tendencies.

Link to LA Times article ‘Suicides a symptom of larger UC crisis’.
Link to NYT article ‘Tracking an Online Trend, and a Route to Suicide’.

Headlong into brain injury and skullduggery

These completely passed me by last year but are well worth checking out: BBC Radio 4 broadcast a couple of excellent radio programmes – one on the effects and treatment of mild brain injury and other other on the doomed historical attempt to link intelligence to skull size.

Mild traumatic brain injury doesn’t necessarily mean that effects are minor.

For some people, fatigue, poor concentration, memory difficulties and irritability may continue when the immediate affects of the injury have subsided.

These symptoms can be quite dramatic, even after simple concussion, and there is now significant interest in this post-concussional syndrome as it is quite disabling for some people.

What is interesting, is that there is evidence that these symptoms can arise out of a combination of the original brain damage plus psychological distress and poor coping strategies.

In other words, it’s not just the brain injury that causes the problems but also how people make sense of and deal with their experience.

The programme on skull size and intelligence looks at how early 20th century researchers tried to link intelligence to skull size in the futile attempt to prove that various races where biologically inferior.

A dodgy aim but an important chapter in the history of science gone wrong.

Link to documentary on mild brain injury.
Link to documentary on intelligence and skull size.

The story of your life

The New York Times has an interesting piece on an often neglected area of psychology that looks at the significance of the stories we use to explain our lives to ourselves and others.

A small but active area of research called ‘narrative psychology‘ has been examining how we make and use stories about our experiences for some years now.

The NYT article picks up on some research findings from Dr Dan McAdams’ research group that show some common themes in life stories and suggest they may be linked to particular psychological characteristics:

In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.

By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.

The article also suggests that the narratives are heavily influenced by our social knowledge, so we apply cultural templates for stories of success, failure and redemption to best make sense of our experience.

Link to NYT article ‘This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)’.

The irrational guide to gaming the system

The latest edition of Scientific American has a freely available feature article on how our decisions are often irrational in game theory terms, but can still be more beneficial than the supposed rational choice.

Game theory tries to understand choices when individuals are working independently and each choice affects the other person’s gains or losses.

In other words, it asks the question ‘considering I don’t know what choice the other person is going to make, what is the best option to maximise my own outcome?’.

This was famously the basis of the American Cold War policy of stockpiling huge amounts of nuclear missiles.

Obviously it would be better if there were fewer nuclear weapons in the world, but if the USA decided to reduce the number of missiles, how could it trust the Soviets to do the same?

Game theory suggested that the best option was to have so many weapons that they could destroy the other country. This way, if the other country reduced their stockpile, they were safe, and if they didn’t, both countries were equally armed.

If this were the case, the potential outcome for starting a nuclear war would be the destruction of both countries. As each wanted to avoid this fate, the idea was that it resulted in a stable but uneasy standoff.

Without a hint of irony, the policy was called MAD, short for Mutual Assured Destruction.

While this is perhaps an extreme example of game theory in action, it can be applied to many situations in which gains and losses are dependent on another person’s choices.

In essence, it’s a mathematical take on a psychological guessing game.

The SciAm article looks at how there are many situations where game theory predicts the most rational outcome, but which may actually lead to much less gains for everyone than if people make an irrational response.

One version of the most rational outcome is the Nash equilibrium, named after Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash, who was also the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind.

This is where everyone has settled on a choice where no one has anything to gain by choosing something else.

As the article discusses, this rarely happens in practice, however, and in many cases people just take the risk that they may get screwed over and maximise their benefits as a result.

This suggests that game theory can be a narrow view of human interaction (for example, it doesn’t account for the role of dialogue in the arms race).

This was also a criticism made by Adam Curtis, producer of documentary series The Trap, who argued that game theory had given a cynical and oversimplified view of human psychology that has been disastrously applied to politics.

Whether you buy Curtis’ political view or not, it’s a fascinating example of how trying to model psychological decision making can have a huge influence on world politics.

Curtis’ documentary is variously available online, but unfortunately, video streaming sites are blocked from work, but it seems to turn up quite frequently on a Google search.

And if you want more on economics and rationality, ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone just had a programme on the ethics of economic rationalism.

UPDATE: The Trap episode 1, episode 2 and episode 3 are available on Google video. From some reason episode 3 is in three 20 minutes chunks, but the next chunk is linked from each page.

Link to SciAm article ‘The Traveler’s Dilemma’.
Link to The Philosopher’s Zone on economic rationalism.