What is psychophysics?

The BPS Research Digest has a wonderfully straightforward explanation of a branch of psychology called psychophysics, which attempts to understand the relation between physical qualities and the psychological impressions they cause.

The piece is written by Mind Hacks co-founder and psychophysicist extraordinaire, Dr Tom Stafford, who explains how this key area of psychology uses mathematical models to understand how the brain makes sense of the physical world.

Tom explains how psychophysics tackles these sorts of problems and then explains one of the most important discoveries in psychophysics: Weber’s law.

Psychophysics is heavily used in ergonomics and human-computer interaction.

Knowing, for example, how noticeable something is (like a warning light), gives a huge advantage when trying to design safe and easy-to-use software interfaces, jet fighter cockpits or even home appliances.

Link to BPSRD article ‘An introduction to psychophysics’.

One satiric touch

St Patrick’s in Dublin is the oldest psychiatric hospital in Ireland. It was founded by the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, who left his money after his death in 1745 “To build a house for fools and mad”.

Swift was most famous for his satire and it is no surprise that his founding of St Patrick’s was a satirical nod towards his native Ireland.

Famously, he described his gesture in a poem entitled On the Death of Dr Swift:

He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad,
And showed by one satiric touch
No nation needed it so much.

The hospital was intended as more than just parody, however, as Swift was also genuinely committed to the care of people with mental illness.

Swift had served as one of the Governors of Bethlem Hospital in London and, when he became Dean of the city’s cathedral, he began to realise the appalling conditions that mentally ill Dubliners had to endure.

The hospital still stands today, next to that other 18th century Irish institution, the Guinness Brewery, and is one of the leading centres for psychiatric treatment, teaching and research in Ireland.

Link to brief AJP article on St Patrick’s.
Link to Wikipedia page on St Patrick’s.
Link to St Patrick’s website.

Fighting wildfire

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind recently broadcast an incredibly moving account of a young woman’s fight with a life threatening brain tumour that eventually resulted in her death.

The woman in question was the Australian writer Julie Deakin (pictured left), who wrote the most touching and elegant prose about her experiences of diagnosis and treatment, and the impact of her declining health on her loved ones.

The programme weaves Deakin’s writing with her mother’s recollection of the time, making for a powerful programme.

I was listening to it while walking to work this morning and it stopped me in my tracks on a couple of occasions.

Link to information and transcript.
mp3 of programme audio.

Jousting with magic

Psychiatrist and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom discusses some of the thinking behind his therapeutic approach on p154 of Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (ISBN 0140128468).

Yalom is known for his work in developing existential psychotherapy, group therapy and his engaging and exciting books and novels on the psychotherapeutic process.

To my mind “good” therapy (which I equate with deep, or penetrating, therapy, not with efficient or even, I am pained to say, helpful therapy) conducted with a “good” patient is at bottom a truth-seeking venture. My quarry when I was a novitiate was the truth of the past, to trace all of life’s coordinates and, thereby, to locate and to explain a person’s current life, pathology, motivation and actions.

I used to be so sure. What arrogance! And now what kind of truth was I stalking? I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

But there is timing and judgement. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it.

Link to Irvin Yalom’s website (thanks Annie!).

Turn on, tune in, get out

No sooner than we post something about psychedelic drug research becoming mainstream than a newspaper reports on a psychologist being barred entry to the US because he wrote an article on a 1967 LSD experience.

Dr Andrew Feldmar (pictured right) is a Vancouver based psychologist and psychotherapist who was attempting a regular cross-border visit, this time to meet a friend in Seattle.

When crossing the border, he was stopped for a random check and security typed his name into Google – bring up a link to a 2001 paper on the hot topic of psychedelics and psychotherapy.

The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar was being denied entry due to “narcotics” use. LSD is not a narcotic substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard wasn’t interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for an FBI file.

Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.

Feldmar trained under R.D. Laing, the radical psychiatrist and psychotherapist who himself took LSD in an attempt to better understand psychosis and altered states.

As a curious aside, the article notes that Feldmar first tried LSD after being offered a 900 microgram dose (that’s one big hit of acid), not by Laing, as you might have guessed, but by cognitive neuroscientist par excellence Zenon Pylyshyn, who was his collaborator at the time.

Pylyshyn had reportedly tried LSD out of curiosity but had since become interested in other things and had some of the compound left over.

Link to article ‘LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US’ (via BB).
Link to Feldman’s article ‘Entheogens and Psychotherapy’.

Psychedelics: resurgence or flashback?

Time magazine has recently published two articles on psychedelic drugs: the first on the recent publication of successful psychedelic treatment studies and the other suggesting LSD was first taken up by the cultural and business elite before becoming a staple of the 60s underground.

We covered some of the research investigating the therapeutic potential of various psychedelic compounds in December last year if you want an idea of what sort of studies are being conducted.

The first article notes the slowly changing attitude of the authorities towards doing scientific studies on these drugs, and name checks MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organisation who have done much to promote trust between government and scientists on the issue.

The second article uncovers a few interesting anecdotes about key establishment figures (including one of the Time Inc. founders!) trying psychedelics when they were first being discovered by the USA in the 1950s.

Link to Time article ‘Was Timothy Leary Right?’.
Link to Time article ‘When the Elite Loved LSD’.
Link to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Encephalon 21 arrives

The 21st edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just been published on neurobiology of aging blog Ouroboros.

A couple of my favourites include Dr Deborah Serani discussing a to-be-released psychotherapy game for the Nintendo DS, and Neurophilosopher with a wonderfully in-depth article on Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy.

There are many more fantastic articles in this edition, and it looks beautiful. Head on over.

Link to Encephalon 21.

Health Report on ADHD and child eating disorders

ABC Radio National’s Health Report had a recent programme in two halves, one looking at how eating disorders manifest in childhood and adolescence and another on girls diagnosed with ADHD.

Unexpectedly, the guest for the second section, psychologist Prof Steve Hinshaw, is asked about his work on stigma and mental illness and has some interesting comments to make about how scientific models of mental illness can influence how stigmatised someone feels after being given a particular diagnosis.

As well as this interesting detour, the programme examines how ADHD and eating disorders can start, and are treated, in childhood.

mp3 of whole programme.
Link to transcript of eating disorders section.
Link to ADHD in girls section.

Wear your brain on your sleeve

Shirt and t-shirt site Hide Your Arms has just reviewed a fantastic t-shirt that has a wonderful exploded brain picture on the front and a recent neuroscience news story on the back.

The shirt is from a company called T-Post who send subscribers a new t-shirt every six weeks based on a recent news story.

This t-shirt is based on the findings of a research study that found that activation in an area of the right temporal lobe when viewing others’ actions was associated with self-reported altruism.

Link to Hide Your Arms shirt review.
Link to T-Post.

SciAmMind on body image and coma-like states

A new edition of Scientific American Mind has arrived with two freely available articles online: one on the distortion of body image in eating disorders and the other on whether brain scans could be a communication channel for people in coma-like vegetative states.

Perhaps the key feature of eating disorders such as anorexia is not just that the person wants to be thin, but that they have a disturbance in their body image so they think they are fat, even when dangerously undernourished.

The SciAmMind article looks at research which attempts to understand how and why body image becomes disturbed and how this can contribute to disorded eating patterns.

This second article discusses the implications of a study [pdf] published recently by Adrian Owen and colleagues suggesting that some patients in a persistent vegetative state or PVS might actually have conscious awareness which they can’t outwardly express (see previously on Mind Hacks).

The first step is getting a general understanding of the patient’s state of mind. Clinicians divide disorders of consciousness into three categories: coma, in which a patient is neither awake nor responsive; vegetative, in which a patient is awake but unresponsive; and minimally conscious, in which a patient is awake and responds to stimuli but has limited capacity to take willful actions. Typically doctors make these categorizations by observing a patient at the bedside. By this method alone, a patient thought to be vegetative could actually be aware.

“It’s really a conundrum. The way that consciousness is typically measured is by basically asking somebody to tell you that they are conscious,” Owen says. “So if someone wasn’t unconscious but couldn’t respond and tell you that, they would be classed as unconscious.” In Owen’s team’s case study, reported in the September 8, 2006, issue of the journal Science, the researchers asked the vegetative patient to imagine herself doing various tasks, including walking through the rooms of her home, while they scanned her brain using fMRI. The resulting images showed that her response matched that of healthy test subjects – she understood the commands and intentionally decided to comply.

Other articles available in the print edition or to subscribers tackle food addiction, brain development in adolescence, perceptual integration, the psychology of stalkers, lithium in the treatment of neurological disorders, pain disorders and implanted ‘brain chips’.

Link to contents for April 2007 issue.
Link to article on body image and eating disorder.
Link to article on communicating in vegetative state.

Journalists at risk from electronic smog

The Independent on Sunday has the dubious honour of publishing one of the worst pieces of science journalism I have ever read on today’s front cover – claiming to ‘reveal’ that children are at risk from Wi-Fi computer networks because of their developing nervous systems.

The headlines include “Children at risk from electronic smog”, “Revealed: radiation threat from new wireless computer networks”, “Fears rise over health threat to children from wifi networks” and “Danger on the airwaves”.

This is despite the fact that not one single study has found a health risk for wifi networks.

In fact, a recent study that measured wifi emissions found “In all cases, the measured Wi-Fi signal levels were very far below international exposure limits (IEEE C95.1-2005 and ICNIRP) and in nearly all cases far below other RF signals in the same environments”.

Personally, I’m more concerned about the smog that comes from whatever they’ve been smoking at the Independent on Sunday.

Link to abstract of recent study on wifi exposure.

For one night only: Art from the inside

Being at St Clements is a one night only art event being held in London on the night of Tuesday 24th April to showcase a project combining the talents of dedicated artists and patients from a psychiatric hospital.

The event will present some brand new multimedia works, including a never before seen video and animation projects, sound installations and an exhibition of digital prints.

It will also include a live show to keep you entertained throughout the evening.

The event is being held at the SPACE Gallery, 129-131 Mare Street, London, E8 3RH. 6 – 9pm (Live show @ 7pm).

Link to details of event (thanks Tenyen!).

The defeat of sleep

BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast a documentary on the effects of the new generation of anti-sleep drugs on health and society.

Drugs, such as modafinil and adrafinil, seem to remove the need for sleep and promote alertness while having minimal side-effects in most users.

Unlike older drugs which prevent sleep, such as amphetamine, these drugs typically don’t feel pleasurable and have few other effects, meaning they are less likely to be used recreationally or lead to compulsive use.

Originally used to treat sleep disorders, there is now a large grey market for these compounds, as people use them to extend their work or play time.

The BBC documentary tackles the possible effects on society of being able to easily manipulate and delete the need for sleep at will, as well as investigating the possible mind and brain consequences of not sleeping for long periods.

Link to The Defeat of Sleep webpage with embedded audio.

A quick snack before the main meal?

I returned from lunch and was surprised to find an email from The Mind Lab giving details of the ‘chocolate vs kissing’ study we reported on earlier and dismissed as rubbish. So, is it junk?

Well, it certainly wouldn’t get published in an academic journal, but it’s certainly not as far-fetched as it seemed from the press releases.

Notably, it’s described as a ‘pilot study’ which is often a test-run study done by scientists to try out methods, equipment, ideas or get some initial data.

The email from Dr David Lewis noted that it was for a larger piece of research investigating the role of certain food stuffs in enhancing vigilance in groups whose performance often seriously, and sometimes fatally, affected by fatigue – such as long distance drivers and combat troops.

After reading the report, the premise still seems a bit daft (melting chocolate vs kissing? why?), the number of participants low (only 12), the methods not as robust as they could be and the data presented as summary graphs only with no statistical analysis.

But, for the first time ever for a ‘PR study’, I was provided details of the study when they were requested, so at least I can see that for myself.

Whether it’s healthy that research labs should be ‘selling’ pilot studies (which can’t really be used to draw any firm conclusions) for the advertising industry to promote as science is another matter.

The report is available from The Mind Lab on request.

Link to The Mind Lab.

Psychology in top ten most satisfying jobs in America

Yahoo! News is reporting that psychology has been ranked the 9th most satisifying job in America.

The ranking is from a project from the University of Chicago called the ‘General Social Survey’ which monitors changes in attitude and behaviour across various populations.

I can’t actually find the original research online, but any pointers would be gratefully received.

For a list of the most and least satisifying jobs, follow the link below.

Link to Yahoo! News story ‘Survey Reveals Most Satisfying Jobs’.