2007-04-20 Spike activity

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

Cognitive Daily investigates the curious psychological effects of self-refilling bowls.

The San Francisco Chronicle discusses OCD from the perspective of a popular radio broadcaster and author who experiences the condition.

OmniBrain finds three auditory illusions you can try yourself.

Recent find of an old paper: Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities.

Does having more children make you happier? Frontal Cortex investigates.

BBC News looks at pharmaceutical drugs that may boost your brain power.

The Neurophilosopher commemorates the 64th birthday of LSD.

SciAm Mind Matters has a good review of a recent Science paper on visual processing. Scroll down to section entitled ‘Selective Vision‘ (can’t seem to link to individual entries).

Developing Intelligence looks at research on whether children understand time.

Consciousness in the single neuron. A new feature article on Science and Consciousness Review

Madame Fathom investigates part of why smoking may be so attractive despite the health risks: it’s cognitive effects on the brain.

Jeff Hawkins on making AI more human

Independent artificial intelligence researcher Jeff Hawkins has an article in this month’s IEEE Spectrum magazine asking the question ‘why can’t a computer be more like a brain?’.

Hawkins argues that while we hope that machines will be able to simulate human intelligence, we ignore the thing that makes us so – the brain.

He suggests that we need to create artificial intelligence systems that closely match the architecture of the brain to achieve this task.

Hawkins has outlined his arguments, and his own theories of simulated brain architecture, in his book On Intelligence, but if you want a whistle-stop tour of his theories, this article is a great summary.

Link to Hawkin’s article ‘Learn Like a Human’.

I Think With My Brain Now

You wait all day for a neuroscience version of an 80s pop song with scientifically accurate lyrics, and two come along at once.

Hot on the heels of the occipital lobe remix of Britney’s Baby One more Time… comes a re-working of Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now.

This time, some medical students who have obviously spent a little too much time in lab class, bring you the video extravanganza that is I Think With My Brain Now.

The lyrics are very special.

Link to YouTube video of ‘I Think with My Brain Now’.

NewSci on gender identity and the effects of media

This week’s New Scientist has two articles of interest to mind and brain enthusiasts: one on gender identity disorder in adolescents, and the other on the psychological effects of modern media.

Unfortunately, neither are open access articles, so you’ll need to track down a copy at the newsagent or library if you want to have a look.

The article on gender identity disorder (GID) in children is particularly interesting, as transexuals often report that they felt from an early age that they were the ‘wrong sex’.

Gender identity disorder is where a person feels themselves to be male when they are bodily male, or male when they are bodily female.

There is some evidence that the ‘felt sex’ is reflected in brain structure, with male-to-female transsexuals having structures that are more female-like.

In adult life, some people choose to have hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery to change from male to female or female to male.

Some clinics are now treating children as young as 12, more often with hormone therapy, causing significant controversy.

It’s probably worth noting that not everyone in the transgender community appreciates that their wish to be another sex is classified as a disorder in itself, even if they do accept it can create a significant amount of psychological distress.

Furthermore, some people don’t see gender as a one-or-the-other classification and might consider themselves to be neither or both.

The article on the psychological effects of media examines how television and computer games might be altering our cognitive abilities.

In a nutshell, the research suggests that increased television viewing correlates with attentional problems, but computer game players tend to have better attentional skills.

The article also gives advice for parents on managing TV viewing to reduce the negative impact on children.

As a complete aside, the ‘leet among you might be interested to know that this week’s edition of NewSci is issue number 2600. j0!

Link to contents for this week’s NewSci.

Brain surgery robot

Researchers from the University of Calgary have released the first version of NeuroArm – a surgeon-controlled robot for conducting brain surgery.

The key feature of the robot is that it is designed to work inside an MRI brain scanner.

MRI scans currently provide the most accurate structural image of the brain and therefore provide important information for planning operations.

Neurosurgeons also use MRI scans completed before surgery to guide the operation while it’s happening, using a method called stereotactic neurosurgery.

This allows surgical instruments to be guided to an exact spot in the brain by tracking their position in real time, in relation to the 3D scan completed earlier.

One disadvantage is that the brain scan can’t be updated as the brain is altered during the operation.

Being able to scan people while they’re having surgery might sound a simple idea, but MRI scans involve the patient being inside a tube surrounded by hugely powerful magnets, meaning the environment isn’t accommodating to surgeons who need free space and surgical steel.

NeuroArm has been designed to fit inside the tube, and crucially, is not made of any magnetic materials that will affect and be affected by the MRI machine.

This means the surgeon can update the brain scan and complete the operation by controlling the robot remotely.

He or she can do this by using a specially designed surgical workstation that provides a virtual interface to the robot arms, including force feedback on the tools, so the surgeon does not have to give up his ‘surgical touch’.

While the current set-up seems to involve the surgeon being located in the same building as the patient, it is interesting to speculate that, in the future, operations could be directed from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

The combination of the accurate brain scan and the robot controlled tools also means that the surgeon should be able to attempt microsurgery on very fine brain structures.

You may be surprised to learn that robot-assisted neurosurgery isn’t particularly new and was introduced in the 1980s.

Brown University has a fantastic history of the technology and procedures if you want some background.

Link to Project neuroArm page.
Link to more info on Project neuroArm.
Link to write-up from New Scientist.
Link to history of robotic neurosurgery page.

Neuroimaging Britishness

A recent study comparing British and non-British participants has found some compelling differences in brain structure that may account for differences in national character.

One of the images from the study is available online and is a striking demonstration of how cognitive neuroscience can answer some of the mysteries of cultural diversity.

Link to online copy of brain scan image (thanks Kevin!).

I don’t know who I am

The New York Times has just published an article on dissociative fugue, the poorly understood memory disorder where people seem to forget who they are.

It has many similarities to conversion disorder where people seem to experience a disability (such as paralysis) despite having nothing medically wrong with them.

Both conversion disorder and dissociative fugue are often linked to trauma and they are often thought to arise from emotional difficulties being pushed from consciousness and expressed in other ways – all outside the conscious control of the patient.

Brain imaging research has shown that these sorts of states are likely to be different from people purely ‘faking’ the same thing, but in the clinic, fakers might be still quite hard to detect and extensive neuropsychological testing may be required to do so.

Also, there’s always the worry that there is some medical reason for the problem that just hasn’t been found yet.

Despite these difficulties, some researchers are investigating these conditions, which may provide vital clues to understanding the conscious mind.

The article discusses some famous cases of dissociative fugue and deal with some of the differences with amnesia after brain injury.

It also mentions that a play about the condition, entitled Fugue, is running at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre until April 22.

Link to NYT article ‘When a Brain Forgets Where Memory Is’.
Link to description of dissociative fugue from the Merck Manual.

John Holter, brain engineer

In 1955, after seven years of trying, John and Mary’s first child was born. The birth of Casey Holter turned John Holter’s life upside-down and changed the course of medical history.

Agonisingly, Casey had spina bifida, a condition where the spine doesn’t fully form and may be dangerously misshapen.

The condition was also causing hydrocephalus, a life-threatening build-up of fluid in the brain.

The fluid that surrounds the brain is called cerebrospinal fluid or CSF and acts as a fluid ‘bath’ which cushions and protects the delicate organ.

It is produced by a structure in the brain stem called the choroid plexus and circulates around the brain before being drained into the blood supply.

If the drainage system is blocked, however, it can lead to a dangerous build-up that can pressure, distort and eventually damage the brain beyond repair. If left untreated, it can be deadly.

In 1955, the only thing keeping Casey Holter alive was a twice daily procedure where a needle was inserted into the fontanelle, the soft spot on a baby’s head, and the excess fluid was removed with a syringe to reduce the pressure.

Eventually, Casey was given an operation by the neurosurgeon Eugene Spitz to insert a ball and spring valve that would, in principle, allow the fluid to drain into the blood supply, without letting anything dangerous from the blood wash back into the CSF.

Unfortunately, the valve was clumsy technology, and when inserted, it irritated Casey’s heart to the point where the young child had a heart attack and suffered permanent brain damage.

John Holter, then working as a technician in a hydraulics factory, asked Eugene Spitz about the details of the procedure. He was surprised that the problem, which seemed to him like a simple hydraulics issue, had not been solved.

He had noticed that when nurses inserted needles into certain types of medical tubing, leaks didn’t occur because the gap was water-tight under low pressure conditions.

But, like a teat on a baby’s bottle, when the pressure was high enough the gap opened and the fluid forced its way through. A perfect valve for releasing built-up CSF and preventing backwash.

Holter went home, sat in his workshop, and constructed the first version that very evening. It was a rough-and-ready rubber-tubing and condom prototype, but it worked.

While the principle was sound, Spitz noted that that the valve must made of a material that wouldn’t irritate the body, as this might cause the same problem that had brain-damaged his son.

Holter contacted Dow Chemical and was advised to use silicone, at the time, a newly developed material.

Holter had created a usable version within months. So quickly, in fact, that his son was still too weak from the last operation to have it installed.

It was first and successfully installed in another child, and then in March 1956, Eugene Spitz installed John Holter’s valve into Casey, successfully treating his hydrocephalus.

Sadly, Casey never fully recovered from his brain damage from the initial operation, and died during an epileptic seizure five years later.

Fittingly, Casey’s legacy is that Holter’s invention, now called the Spitz-Holter shunt, is still in use today.

Holter spent the rest of his life developing valves for medical use and passed away in 2003, having saved the lives of thousands children affected by the same condition as his son.

It is estimated that 15,000 valves based on Holter’s design are installed every year in the United States alone.

John Holter’s remarkable story was retold in a 2001 paper published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons upon which this article was based.

Link to PubMed entry for Journal of the American College of Surgeons paper.

Bongo-bongoism

A curious term from anthropology describing the tendency for someone to come up with a counter-example from some usually obscure and remote tribe when anyone makes a general claim about human culture.

Bongo-bongoism: the venerable but ultimately sterile anthropological practice of countering every generalization with an exception located somewhere at some time.

Apparently, it was first used by anthropologist Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols.

Link to the culture evolves! blog (where I found the definition).

Interfacing consciousness, action and vision

Consciousness research journal Psyche has just released a new issue that tackles the limits of vision and visual cognition.

The issue starts with an article summarising the main arguments in the book Ways of Seeing by philosopher Pierre Jacob and neuroscientist Marc Jeannerod.

The book tackles the interface between vision and our other psychological abililties and particularly focuses on the visual pathways.

These are the two main pathways that run from the visual cortex at the back of the brain either through the dorsal stream to the parietal lobes, or the ventral stream to the temporal lobes.

The dorsal stream is sometimes called the ‘where’ stream as it seems to process the location of objects, whereas the ventral stream is sometimes called the ‘what’ stream as it seems to process the identification and meaning of objects.

After brain injury, one stream could be damaged and the other left intact, so a patient, when shown an object, might be able to tell you what it’s for, but would not be able to point to its location.

This distinction is particularly important when considering how we act based on visual information, as it is known that we don’t always access both these streams of information to the same degree for different types of action, and we aren’t always conscious of all the visual information we use during action.

Exactly how the interaction between conscious and unconscious information occurs, and the exact function of the streams, is still a mystery and this exactly what Jacob and Jeannerod tackle in their Psyche article:

Visually guided actions raise a different (almost complementary) puzzle: how can actions directed towards a target be so accurate in the absence of the agent’s awareness of many of the target’s visual attributes? Ways of Seeing (WoS) has three related goals, the first of which is to make the case for a broadly representational approach to the above set of puzzles.

The second goal of WoS is to argue that the version of the ‘two-visual systems’ model of human vision best supported by the current empirical evidence has the resources to solve the puzzle of visually guided actions, which has been at the center of much recent work in the cognitive neuroscience of vision and action.

The third goal of WoS is to draw attention to some of the tensions between acceptance of the two-visual systems model of human vision and some influential views about the nature and function of the content of visual experience espoused by philosophers in response to the puzzles raised by visual experience.

The remaining articles in the issue are debate from philosophers and cognitive scientists who question whether these two visual systems really create distinct forms of mental content, and whether the object-based actions and social actions are handled differently by the brain.

The journal is open-access, so all articles are freely available online.

Link to Psyche.

All the taste, none of the calories

Why does this leave a bad taste in my mouth? Numerous news sources are reporting that chocolate has a stronger effect on the heart and brain than kissing.

Alarm bells started ringing when it became obvious that the story is a promotion for a sweet company trying to advertise a new line of chocolate bars.

The ‘research’ was conducted by a company called The Mind Lab who offer to do psychology studies for a number of purposes, including “PR oriented research” to get a “route into the media”.

Their founder, Dr David Lewis, can even be hired to “provide independent, third party, endorsement”, demonstrating that contradiction is no barrier to good marketing.

Apparently, the study used EEG and heart rate measures to compare response during kissing, to response during a bizarre condition where a lump of chocolate was put on the tongue and was left until it melted.

I say apparently, because the research itself seems not to be available.

It doesn’t seem to have been published anywhere (although I can’t say there are many neuropsychology journals crying out for EEG studies comparing melted chocolate and kissing) and so far, the company has not responded to my request for the details of the study.

What is slightly disappointing is that the company seems also to do ‘serious’ research and the founder is an established researcher.

A well-written, elegantly designed, surprisingly creative research paper may yet turn up in my inbox, but until that time, I’d avoid the junk.

Anyway, we know from published neuroscience research that too much chocolate makes you feel sick (and just how the brain might generate the feeling).

UPDATE: Four days later and no reply to my requests. This one’s junk.

UPDATE 2: I finally did get details of the study from The Mind Lab. I posted about it here.

Link to a genuinely interesting chocolate study.

The uncanny, fantasy and imagination in Irish art

Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland has a free exhibition looking at how the uncanny, fantasy and imagination have been represented in Irish art.

Although only three rooms, there are some wonderful pieces, many of which explicitly touch on psychological themes.

This is an extract from the programme:

The Fantastic has manifested itself in various ways, some subtle and some more dramatic and outrageous. The most obvious manner in which the concept was presented in both literary and visual terms was by drawing the viewer’s attention to the ambiguity of everyday experience. This effect can be considered in terms of the idea of the uncanny, where the familiar is made to appear strange and disturbing.

Sigmund Freud, writing on this phenomenon in 1919, expressed his fascination with the way in which an artwork could affect a strong psychological response in the viewer or reader by creating something that was both familiar and alien at the same time. He believed that the uncanny triggered repressed memories from childhood and it is notable that many of the artworks in this exhibition which evoke the uncanny, refer to childlike forms or activities.

There’s also various free talks associated with the exhibition, the best of which looks to be ‘The Fantastic in Art: The Inner World of the Imagination’ which unfortunately happens at the inconvenient time of 10.30am on Tuesday 17th April.

The exhibitions runs until the 12th August.

Link to exhibition information.

Battery powered brain scanner

BBC News has an interesting video report on a hand-held device that uses near-infrared light to penetrate the skull and test the cortex for haematomas – a type of potentially dangerous blood clot caused by head injury.

The device is called the InfraScanner and doesn’t create the sort of brain scans you might be used to seeing, but instead is a hand-held device specifically designed to diagnose this specific type of injury.

It uses technology called ‘near infrared spectroscopy‘ that involves rays of near infrared light being beamed into the head.

This light can penetrate through the skull and a few centimetres into the brain.

Some of this light is reflected back and some is absorbed, depending on what the light encounters on its path.

By measuring the light that get reflected back, it’s possible to determine the structure of the underlying material.

The device uses these principles to work out whether the area under the scanner is normal brain tissue or has a bleed in it.

This can be life-saving information and being able to do this on the spot, rather than needing to give someone a full brain scan, would obviously be incredibly useful.

The technology is also being used in a more complex form called Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to look at brain activation during mental tasks, in a similar way to other types of brain imaging.

The advantage with fNIRS, however, is that it doesn’t involve being put into a big tube (like fMRI), injected with radiation (like PET), doesn’t need a shielded room (like MEG) and has better spatial resolution than EEG.

The technology is still relatively new though and it can only look at surface brain structures, but looks like a promising technology, particularly when it can be modified into hand-held diagnostic devices.

There’s a excellent review of its use in brain imaging in a recent scientific paper (if you have access to the journal) and in a freely available article (pdf) from an IEEE engineering magazine.

Link to video report from BBC News.
Link to PubMed abstract of scientific review.
pdf of magazine article on fNIRS.

Back to the Future Brain

It’s a timeless romantic tale. Boy meets girl. Boy accidentally puts girl into a coma in a car accident. Boy tries to revive girl in his neuroscience lab while singing an 80s pop song.

The video for the 1985 song Future Brain by Italian pop artist Den Harrow is on YouTube if you want to satisfy your morbid curiosity.

According to Den Harrow’s Wikipedia entry he didn’t even sing his own songs. Presumably the lab was all his own work though.

Neuroscience made simple

If you think the neuroscience of mental illness is just too complicated to understand, there’s no need to worry your pretty little head about it.

Dr Bonkers has kindly collected explanations of these otherwise poorly understood disorders, simplified for you, by those ever helpful drug industry marketing departments.

Why waste time following those baffling scientific debates about how the most complex organ in the known universe experiences distressing and disabling mental states when the following explanation will suffice:

Although [insert name of mental disorder here] is not fully understood, there is growing evidence that it is caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain.

What ‘growing evidence’ can mean is everything from virtually none (in the case of serotonin and depression) to the evidence points to some role for an excess of neurotransmitter action in a particular brain circuit but there is still some contradictory evidence and isn’t a complete explanation of the whole disorder (in the case of dopamine and psychosis).

But who would want to worry patients who already have a lot on their minds with complicated brain science, let alone trouble them with mixed evidence from the results of clinical trials that tested the medication for its usefulness.

It’s interesting to note that the information on Dr Bonkers’ site is all from direct-to-consumer marketing, at a time when psychiatrists themselves are being specifically trained to communicate the complexities of the science to patients.

An excellent Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast tackles how to communicate the results of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to a patient wanting to know how a drug might affect them.

It’s well worth listening to if you want some insider knowledge that will help you make sense of the marketing claims.

And if you want a simple explanation of the neuroscience of mental disorder and how drugs affect the brain, well, there isn’t one.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Link to Dr Bonkers’ Science Made Simple (thanks Ben!).
Link to RCP podcast on interpreting drug trials.

Central catacomb

“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? ‚Äî the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world ‚Äî a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”

A quote from Virginia Woolf’s short story An Unwritten Novel.

Woolf suffered from debilitating depression throughout her life and eventually committed suicide at the age of 58, but not before revolutionising modernist literature and leaving a huge legacy of both fiction and non-fiction works.