Issue 22 of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just arrived, this time hosted by anthropologist John Hawks.
A couple of my favourites include a compelling article from Madam Fathom on the evolution of the nervous system and another by Pure Pedantry on the complex considerations needed to answer the question ‘Do autistic people have a deficit in reading faces?’.
There are many more great articles in the rest of issue 22.
Link to Encephalon 22.
There’s been a wonderful series of posts at neuroscience blog Neuroevolution which have charted the history of cognitive neuroscience from ancient Greece to the age of the brain scanner.
There’s been 26 posts in all, each of them a beautifully illustrated snapshot of a groundbreaking discovery.
The series tells the story of how we’ve come to understand more and more about the workings of the mind and brain, with each discovery building on the lessons of history.
Highly recommended.
Link to “History‚Äôs Top Insights Into Brain Computation”.
You would think they’d be lots of good psychological theories of wisdom, as it’s something we talk about all the time in everyday life, but there just isn’t.
Psychologists have traditionally avoided the subject, although, thankfully, this is now starting to change and the New York Times has an in-depth article looking at some of the recent findings.
The article also looks at why the subject has been ignored, partly, of course, because it’s quite hard to define.
Nevertheless, one person who has pioneered the study of wisdom is neuropsychologist Dr Vivian Clayton who began studying this most valued of human traits in the 1970s.
Between 1976, when she finished her dissertation, and 1982, Clayton published several groundbreaking papers that are now generally acknowledged as the first to suggest that researchers could study wisdom empirically. She identified three general aspects of human activity that were central to wisdom — the acquisition of knowledge (cognitive) and the analysis of that information (reflective) filtered through the emotions (affective). Then she assembled a battery of existing psychological tests to measure it.
Clayton laid several important markers on the field at its inception. She realized that “neither were the old always wise, nor the young lacking in wisdom.” She also argued that while intelligence represented a nonsocial and impersonal domain of knowledge that might diminish in value over the course of a lifetime, wisdom represented a social, interpersonal form of knowledge about human nature that resisted erosion and might increase with age. Clayton’s early work was “a big deal,” Sternberg says. “It was a breakthrough to say wisdom is something you could study.” Jacqui Smith, who has conducted wisdom research since the 1980s, says it “was seminal work that really triggered subsequent studies.”
The article discusses some of Clayton’s early groundbreaking work in the field and goes on to look at what modern psychology and neuroscience is telling us about how we understand wisdom and act wisely, particularly in terms of emotion and maturity through the later years.
Link to NYT article ‘The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis’.
I just found this interesting snippet in a BBC News story about the development and imminent launch of the new Astute class Navy submarine:
It may be one of the most sophisticated submarines ever built, but the project has been beset with problems. The three submarines are £900m ($1.8bn) over budget and four years behind the original schedule.
But a new boss at Barrow, Murray Easton, introduced big changes when he arrived a few years back.
A team of psychologists was brought into the yard to improve management effectiveness, and to create better ways of communication. Even now a psychologist is present at every board meeting.
I could write everything I know about organisational psychology (psychology applied to business, team work and organisations) on the back of napkin but I’m curious as to what role a psychologist would play at board meetings.
However, while trying to find out (and failing) I found two short articles (one and two) on ‘submarine psychologists’ who work for the Navy researching life on board underwater vessels.
Link to BBC News story ‘Alien submarine breaks technical barriers’.
Link 1 and link 2 to articles on ‘submarine psychologists’.
Open-access science journal PLoS Biology has another fantastic article that investigates what neuroscience tells about about the causes of antisocial behaviour and how damage to the brain can, in rare cases, lead someone to become violent.
The article looks at research on the neuropsychology of violent criminals, as well as ‘forensic neurology’ – the science of understanding how brain injury can remove the normal inhibitions for aggression.
Some striking case studies are covered as well as possible ways of understanding and managing criminality.
Criminality and violence is a difficult area, as personal motivations and influences are complex. The paper notes that:
To be clear, there is at present no reason to believe that all criminal behaviours, or indeed even all violent criminal behaviours, are the result of organically dysfunctional brains. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that some kinds of dysfunction are likely to increase the probability of some kinds of behaviours that society labels as criminal.
The discussion also covers how the legal system might make sense of these new brain discoveries, in light of neuroscience evidence being increasingly used in court cases as a way of determining if someone is telling the truth, and as a way of arguing for reduced responsibility for a criminal act.
Link to PLoS Biology article ‘Law, Responsibility, and the Brain’.
While looking for neuroscience videos we’ve found some pretty weird stuff on YouTube before, but despite their quirkiness, at least they made sense. This one’s just completely baffling.
It seems to be a sort of love letter, presented as a brain diagram, with a disco backing track. Apparently it’s dedicated to someone called Leyla, and it’s from a teddy bear.
I’m assuming it makes sense to someone out there.
Link to YouTube video ‘Neuroscience with Patchy’.
NPR has a short video report on how social conventions, like keeping personal space, transfer into virtual worlds like Second Life.
The report focuses on the work of psychologist Nick Yee who we interviewed last November about his research into the social psychology of virtual worlds.
Yee and the NPR reporter go and field test some of his findings in Second Life, demonstrating that we use the same rules of social psychology taken from physical space to moderate online interactions.
As an aside, Yee’s has recently written a fascinating article on the psychology of how players develop superstitions in virtual worlds.
Link to NPR report with video and podcast.
Author Bruce Stutz writes about his experience of depression, stopping antidepressants and the science of SSRI withdrawal in an article for the New York Times.
Withdrawal from SSRI medication, a group which includes drugs such as Prozac, Seroxat and Zoloft, is known to cause considerable discomfort in about 1 in 5 people.
It’s been spun as a ‘discontinuation syndrome‘ by the drug companies, as ‘withdrawal symptoms’ sounds a bit too much like what drug addicts have.
Although SSRIs are not addictive in the sense that they don’t cause a strong desire to take more, the brain does go through a significant period of readjustment when the drug leaves the body.
The NYT article examines Stutz’s experience of treatment for depression, and how he coped with the withdrawal symptoms that he was unlucky enough to experience.
The piece also takes a look at the neuroscience of serotonin and mood, with a more critical analysis than is often found in some mainstream science articles.
Link to NYT article ‘Self-Nonmedication’.
A funny list from McSweeney’s entitled “The Names of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs After Being Prescribed Paxil, Ritalin, Prozac, Lithium, Provigil, and Benadryl.”
Prospect magazine has an engaging article by psychologist Judith Rich Harris who argues, contrary to popular belief, that parents are not the most important influence in a child’s development.
Harris wrote a book called The Nurture Assumption, and more recently No Two Alike, that both took a similar line, suggesting that the influence of the home environment is relatively small in shaping a child’s personality.
She bases this on research suggesting that children can and do adapt their behaviour according to whether they’re with their parents, with others, in the home, or otherwise.
Harris suggests that child behaviours that remain the same across various environments are more likely to be influenced by genetics.
In other words, she argues that the idea we relate to others in specific ways because we’ve learnt certain core relationship styles with our parents is mistaken, and in fact, we develop context and person specific relationship patterns that can be seen even from an early age.
She gives the example of the classic distinction made between the personalities of first and last born children:
Firstborns and laterborns do behave in characteristic ways when they’re in the presence of their parents and siblings, but they drop these behaviours when they’re away from their family. Like James in [TV programme] Child of our Time, they adapt their behaviour to their setting. The firstborn who dominates his younger siblings at home doesn’t automatically assume that he will also be able to dominate his classmates. After all, even though he’s the largest child at home, he may turn out to be the smallest one in the playground. Research confirms that firstborn children are, on average, no more dominant in the playground than are laterborns. Nor do laterborns go through life permanently cowed. A laterborn who is pushed around by his older brother at home is fully capable of stepping into a dominant role with his peers.
Link to Prospect article ‘Why home doesn’t matter’.
Link to Wikipedia page on Judith Rich Harris with many links.
Alice and Jabberwacky are the world’s leading AI chatbots and they’ve finally met.
The rendezvous is described in an article from Discover magazine, who got in touch to say that it’s a teaser for their already-on-the-shelves special issue ‘The Brain: A User’s Guide’ which seemed to be curiously absent from their website.
The limits of the bots’ abilities are clear from some of the transcripts, but there are some truly sublime moments in their as well:
A: Do you dream?
J: Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.
If you think robots shouldn’t be flirting with each other, you may want to have a look at a previous Mind Hacks article on the confusion that occurs when humans try their luck with AI systems – either real or imagined.
Link to Discover article ‘I Chat, Therefore I Am…’
Link to Mind Hacks article ‘The Robots are Coming’.
Another scientist has sold his soul to the God of PR and promoted a nonsense formula in the media – this time for the ‘perfect Page 3 girl’. For those not used to the British tabloid press, page 3 traditionally displays a picture of a topless girl.
The offender on this occasion is Cambridge University medical researcher Dr David Granger, who is seemingly trying to promote a commercial diagnostics company by talking drivel to the media.
I honestly don’t know how this happens. If I was looking to hire a commercial science company, one that had just advertised itself with some spectacularly bad pseudoscience would be bottom of my list.
Link to Dr Petra with the gory details.
Zimbardo’s famous ‘Stanford Prison Experiment‘ is often cited as an example of where circumstances influence average people to take up abusive roles.
In a recent article in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland tested the idea that the people who volunteer for this sort of study were truly ‘average’ and found that they had character traits that could encourage abuse.
To recruit participants, the researchers used the newspaper advert from the original Stanford Prison Experiment, as well as another advert that was identical, except for the mention of ‘prison life’.
They found that volunteers who responded to the advert that mentioned ‘prison life’ scored significantly higher on measures of the abuse-related dispositions of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism.
This suggests that circumstances may not be the only factor in influencing the sort of behaviour seen in the original study, as some people may have particular attitudes that could make abuse more likely when the circumstances allow for it.
There is further commentary and analysis of the research over at the ever-excellent CrimePsychBlog.
Link to CrimePsychBlog on ‘Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment’.
Link to abstract of research study.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Deep brain stimulation research continues with trials of DBS for memory problems and as a way of implanting artificial vision systems.
ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone takes a look at the philosophy of art and emotion.
Cognitive Daily has a demo and explanation of how we learn to keep track of multiple moving objects.
The Observer reports on a study suggesting that girls with more feminine names are least likely to go into maths and science-based professions. See previously for other research on how our names influence behaviour.
Magnetic pulses may be able to trigger slow wave sleep in insomniacs, reports The Independent.
What neural mechanisms underlie “fluid intelligence? Developing Intelligence looks at one of the latest studies.
New Scientist reports that native speakers of Russian, which lacks a single word for “blue”, discriminate between light and dark blues differently from native English speakers.
PsyBlog investigates research on sex differences in understanding non-verbal communication.
New Scientist reports that anatomical brain differences have been found in sufferers of the controversial ‘Gulf War Syndrome’.
Research investigating implicit racial bias in NBA referees is analysed by Mixing Memory.
Wired has an article on the Pentagon showing their next-generation ‘brain interfaced’ electronic binoculars.
The Neurophilosopher has some fantastic coverage of the recent study that scanned the orginal brains that led Broca to discover Broca’s Area and inspire the science of cognitive neuropsychology.
Resident Evil and Silent Hill have been given a psychoanalytic interpretation by two academics wanting to undercover the underlying symbolism of these popular video games.
The analysis attempts to illustrate how “the poststructuralist divide between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis plays out in the differences between the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series”.
Needless to say, the article is steeped in the language of psychoanalysis and postmodernism. But if you can get through the jargon, it’s an entertaining essay on the narratives used in the game play and plot of the two games.
Silent Hill significance stems from its avant-garde status: it anticipates our familiarity with these conventions and works to subvert them, problematizing our desire for stability and coherence. These subversions work by collapsing the distances between player, avatar, and game unsettling our expectation to retain a clinical distance between the twisted world of our avatars and the sacred normality of our own real world.
This is epitomized near the end of Silent Hill 3 when a professorial character inquisitively questions the “enjoyment” that Heather, our avatar, draws from killing the threatening abjections around her. When she responds that she has only killed monsters, Vincent replies with “they look like monsters to you…” Our game play, which until this point has been comfortably positioned as an analytic activity helping Heather work through her traumas, becomes traumatic.
Vincent punctures the fictional fantasy screen, speaking not only to Heather, but also to us. Suddenly the game world collapses around us-for a moment we are subjected as murders, potentially as psychotic as our avatar and/or as one of the very psychopaths we so confidently believed we were killing.
Nothing can be trusted. No longer is it clear that we are working to uphold symbolic order. No longer is it clear that any such order ever has or could so securely exist. Put simply, Resident Evil maintains desire for a Freudian dynamic (one in which order is out there), Silent Hill opens us up to a Lacanian one (one in which, to quote Derrida, “order is no longer assured”
Link to ‘Saving Ourselves: Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill’.
The current issue of the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry has a curious letter about a patient who had the delusional belief that emails were being delivered directly to her mind:
Dear Editor
We report the case of an elderly lady with no experience of using a personal computer or internet technology, whose delusional experiences included the direct personal receipt of email.
Ms T, an 84-year old female with a 40-year history of schizoaffective disorder, presented with a delusional belief that something precious and of value ‘for all people’ had been inserted into her body by a doctor in Germany in the 1950s. She had sought medical help because she believed that an abdominal operative procedure would be necessary to remove a “rat and a teddy bear made of diamonds” that she believed had grown within her.
Following admission, she remained highly guarded, distressed and preoccupied with the need of urgent surgery, which she demanded every time she met her medical team. When asked about the origins of this belief and her desire for surgery, she said that she had gained knowledge about this from a friend, whom she had seen last in 1945.
She explained that she received emails from this friend. These arrived in her mind, exactly like electronic mail, but were managed without a computer. Rather than receiving messages in text form, she received what she described as ‘an impression in my mind’, which conveyed an unequivocal meaning to her. She also believed that her friend had some valuable information for the medical team and that he would be able to contact the senior physician by a similar mechanism.
Following 4 weeks of treatment with risperidone 1.0 mg bd her mental state improved to the point where she stopped receiving the emails, gained insight into her primary belief and told us that she was satisfied that surgery was no longer needed.
There have been previous reports of delusions specific equipment components (Schmid-Siegel et al., 2004) and general activity in the internet (Tan et al., 2004). Most reported cases tend to be in young people, often with a particular experience in using the internet (Bell et al., 2005). To our knowledge, there have been no previous reports of the particular delusion of email receipt by the self. Our case shows that internet-based delusions are not restricted to the young or to those familiar with use of the internet.
Dr Malgorzata Raczek
Prof Robert Howard
Link to PubMed entry for letter.
Mind Hacks 