The E Generation at 40

BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast a documentary on the long-term effects of ecstasy (MDMA) now that the ‘E Generation’ are in their 40s.

The documentary looks at the evidence for long-term effects of ecstasy and dispels some of the myths that were promoted in anti-ecstasy campaigns of the early 90s (for example, the famously flawed brain scans presented to suggest that ecstasy leaves functional ‘holes’ in the brain).

It is clear that such scare stories about the drug’s damaging effects were greatly exaggerated.

The evidence does suggest, however, that heavy and / or long-term ecstasy use does lead to mild to moderate cognitive impairment in some people (memory seems particularly sensitive to change).

There is still a need for much more systematic research in this area, particularly as the evidence on whether these long-term impairments get better is quite mixed.

The programme is presented by Dr John Marsden who has researched the impact and neuroscience of ecstasy and talks to a number of people who were heavy ecstasy users in the past.

Link to ‘The E Generation at 40’ with audio.

Wired on independent neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins

The latest edition of Wired magazine has an article on technology pioneer turned neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins, who is attempting to develop and research a novel way of understanding how the brain learns.

Hawkins is best known for inventing the Palm Pilot and Treo hand held computers, but has now focused his efforts on a long-time interest, neuroscience.

He has founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute that develops computational models of neurobiology and has recently launched an artificial intelligence company Numenta.

Hawkins’ big break into the world of cognitive science came with his book On Intelligence (ISBN 0805078533) where he set out his original and somewhat grand theory of brain function, the ‘memory prediction framework’.

As an independent researcher in the field, he’s gone for quite a different approach from mainstream neuroscience, not least by attempting to develop a theory that aims to explain a major function of the brain in one go.

I must admit, I’ve got a great admiration for independent cognitive science researchers. Steve Grand is another self-taught original thinker (and well worth hearing speak if you get the chance).

The Wired article look both at Hawkins’ theories, and his journey from Silicon Valley engineer to independent mind and brain researcher.

UPDATE: The webpage of Numenta has just been updated with details of the application based on Hawkin’s research on the brain – Thanks Marcos!

Link to Wired article on Jeff Hawkins.

Patricia Churchland – mind, body and brain

Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland is interviewed on ABC Radio’s In Conversation where she talks about her work on understanding how our concepts of the mind can map on to the developing field of neuroscience.

Churchland is particulary known for eliminative materialism, which argues that our everyday understanding of the mind is generally false and won’t ever map onto the brain as neuroscience understands it.

It’s been a powerful, influential but controversial argument in cognitive science.

I mean my idea was something like this: consider the follow analogies. Suppose that you were in a time capsule and you were able to go back to, let’s say the 12th century, and say to a monk who was puzzling deeply about the nature of fire. And you said to him, Look, let me tell you what it is; it’s rapid oxidation and you would go on to talk about how exactly that occurred. Now the thing about it is that, since he does not even know about elements, he still thinks there’s just earth, air, fire and water, it isn’t going to make much sense to him. So you’ve given an answer, but lacking the surrounding theoretical context it would be very hard for him to make sense of it.

And my point about the brain now is that if I were given, in an analogous way, the answer to what it is that makes for conscious states in the brain, given that how much we don’t know about fundamentals in neuroscience, I would likely not be able to make sense of the answer.

Link to In Conversation with Patricia Churchland.

The Young Milgram

From onegoodmove, a short video about Stanley Milgram and his obedience experiments. Doesn’t the young Stanley Milgram look handsome, in a tweed jacket-1970s-professor kind of way?

For more on the man, and to find out about his other groundbreaking experiments, see stanleymilgram.com run by Dr Blass, Milgram’s biographer (featured in the video). And also check out this classic from Dan Wegner the ‘The Milgram Obedience Song’ which features samples from recordings made during the obediance experiments.

Movies and the McGurk Effect

HacksZine is hosting a video by Brian Sawyer who riffs on the Mind Hacks book entry on the McGurk Effect and shows how this is used in movies.

The McGurk effect is, for example, where when you hear the sound of someone saying ‘Ba’ at the same time as you see them saying the sound ‘Ga’, you hear the second, because the information from your vision shapes how you perceive the sound.

Sawyer notes that this is commonly occurs in movies when they’re dubbed, so despite the character saying ‘You lousy melon farmer!’ when this was obviously not what was said in the original, the dubbing doesn’t seem completely out of whack.

Link to ‘Hear with Your Eyes: The McGurk Effect’ from HacksZine.

Equus on Front Row

A new version of Peter Shaffer’s Equus has just opened in London and there was an interesting discussion about the role of psychiatry and mental illness in the play on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, which you can hear as a realaudio stream.

Equus is both a coming-of-age play about a mentally disturbed young man, and a detective story, as the psychiatrist tries to work out what led the young man to blind several horses.

It’s incredibly powerful, both in its content and staging, and was written after Shaffer heard of a case where a boy seemed to senseless attack a number of horses and wondered how someone might get to that point in their life.

The realaudio archive of Front Row only stays online for a week, so will only be available for five days or so more days. Catch it while you can!

The discussion is in the first 10 minutes of the programme.

realaudio of Front Row.
Link to Wikipedia page on Equus.
Link to website of London production of Equus.

You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe

Part of the footnote to ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, a chapter from J.G. Ballard’s chaotic and sometimes confusing novel The Atrocity Exhibition.

In Springfield Mental Hospital near London a few years ago, while visiting a psychiatrist friend, I watched an elderly woman patient helping the orderly serve the afternoon tea. As the thirty or so cups were set out on a large polished table she began to stare at the bobbing liquid, then stepped forward and carefully inverted the brimming cup in her hand.

The hot liquid dripped everywhere in a terrible mess, and the orderly screamed: ‘Doreen, why did you do that?’, to which she replied: ‘Jesus told me to.’ She was right, though I like to think what really compelled her was a sense of the intolerable contrast between the infinitely plastic liquid in her hand and the infinitely hard geometry of the table, followed by the revelation that she could resolve these opposites in a very simple and original way.

She attributed the insight to divine intervention, but the order in fact came from some footloose conceptual area of her brain briefly waking from its heavy sleep of largactil.

The novel also contains a chapter entitled ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ which is a fake psychoanalytic interpretation of experiments that supposedly study the sexual attractiveness of Reagan to potential voters.

Ballard writes in a footnote to this chapter: “At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of my Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republication Party, was distributed to delegates. I’m told it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.”

Presumably, Ballard was not a fan of the Reagan or the Republican Party.

Link to Wikipedia page on The Atrocity Exhibition.

2007-03-02 Spike activity

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

PBS has a TV programme, with online video, about stimulating the brain through nanowires implanted into blood vessels.

Neuroscientist, artist, author and stroke survivor Dr Jill Bolte Taylor is interviewed on Neurofuture.

The brain’s visual system can adapt and develop later in life, even if cataracts block all visual input during childhood, reports BBC News.

Mixing Memory reports on a curious study suggesting that the suggestion of a ghostly presence makes people less likely to cheat.

The Washington Post wonders whether teenage multi-tasking and ‘flitting from task to task’ could affect their long-term ability to focus.

Neural Development is a new open access journal, which is reviewed by Neurophilosopher.

Lack of sleep may impact upon moral judgement, reports New Scientist.

The BPS Research Digest examines research that suggests childhood experiences could increase the risk for PTSD later in life.

Do voters based their choice on facial features rather than message? The Toronto Star considers some recent research that suggests this might be the case.

Edge features Marvin Minsky with an essay on artificial intelligence and the psychology of love.

Another great demo from Cognitive Daily: using word prompts to help change blindness.

MoD ‘remote viewing’ documents online

As a follow up to our recent post reporting that the UK’s Ministry of Defence conducted ‘remote viewing’ experiments, the documents from these experiments are now available on the MoD’s own website.

The documents were requested by someone under the Freedom of Information Act.

There’s lots of blanked out areas, but the observational logs make for intriguing, if not somewhat bizarre, reading.

The subject [blanked] recorded only two ‘images’. The first being the head of a bear or a baboon and the second the word RATS in the style of street graffiti in white…

Though the subject recorded detailed images it was clear from analysis of the target in terms of the descriptions given by the subject that the target was no accessed.

A curious case of government parapsychology research.

Link to MoD’s Remote Viewing documents (via Further).

Artificially evolving social robots

Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating piece on a study that simulated the evolution of communication in artificially intelligent robots.

The robots were small and mobile, were controlled by artificial neural networks, and could send and receive signals via infrared.

A group of robots was put into an arena with a light-emitting ‘food source’ and a ‘poison source’. The robots could only tell the difference when they got close enough to see coloured paper that the ‘sources’ were resting on.

Robots gained a point when they found the ‘food’ and lost a point when they stumbled across the ‘poison’.

Crucially, the researchers could electronically ‘breed’ the robots to improve their neural networks, so they could compare how the offspring of different combinations of best and worst performing robots would behave.

Zimmer notes some of the interesting results:

Here, however, is where the experiment got really intriguing. Each robot wears a kind of belt that can glow, casting a blue light. The scientists now plugged the blue light into the robot circuitry. Its neural network could switch the light on and off, and it could detect blue light from other robots and change course accordingly. The scientists started the experiments all over again, with randomly wired robots that were either related or unrelated, and experienced selection as individuals or as colonies.

At first the robots just flashed their lights at random. But over time things changed. In the trials with relatives undergoing colony selection, twelve out of the twenty lines began to turn on the blue light when they reached the food. The light attracted the other robots, bringing them quickly to the food. The other eight lines evolved the opposite strategy. They turned blue when they hit the poison, and the other robots responded to the light by heading away.

Two separate communication systems had evolved, each benefiting the entire colony.

The researchers have made some Quicktime video available if you want to see this in action and the scientific paper is available as a pdf file.

The research was led by Prof Laurent Keller, a biologist who specialises in understanding the evolution of communication networks.

There’s much more about this fascinating experiment and the other surprising types of behaviour that emerged from it over in Zimmer’s article.

Link to article Carl Zimmer’s article ‘Evolving Robotspeak’.
pdf of scientific paper.

The social intelligence hypothesis

ABC Radio’s Science Show just had a special edition on the evolution of the brain and the development of social intelligence.

The programme talks to some of the leading researchers in social intelligence whose research interests range from comparing the behaviours of animals across species, to neuroimaging humans, to building robots to mimic social interaction.

In particular, the programme tackles the ‘social intelligence hypothesis’ that suggests that our increase in brain size during evolution has been driven by the need to work in groups and make sense of complex relationships.

Prof Steven Mithen explains:

There seems to be two key figures of brain expansion, and I think this is where the social intelligence hypothesis becomes very interesting. The first was around two million years ago, and at that time brains expanded perhaps about 50%. So we went from brain size of around 450cc to a brain size of around 1,000cc by 1.8 million years ago. What’s interesting during that time is that we don’t see dramatic changes in human behaviour as represented by the archaeological remains….

So archaeologists asked; why are brains getting larger and what is it providing? Brains wouldn’t get larger just for any reasons because brain tissue is metabolically very expensive, so it’s got to be serving a really important purpose. I think the social intelligence hypothesis suggests to us that that expansion of brain size around two million years ago was because people were living in larger groups, more complex groups, having to keep track of different people, a larger number of social relationships which we simply required a larger brain to do.

Link to Science Show special on ‘The social intelligence hypothesis’.

Richard Dadd and the madness of an artist

Below is an excerpt from the novel Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie which gives a fictional account of the travels and madness of Victorian artist Richard Dadd.

Dadd was eventually confined to Bethlem Hospital and subsequently to the then ‘Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane’ (now Broadmoor Hospital) for the murder of his father and attempted murder of a tourist while being tormented by paranoid delusions.

Dadd was allowed to keep painting in hospital and produced some of the most important artwork of the era.

From p144 of the novel:

I find myself gazing at sand and seeing green hills.
I notice hideous faces glaring at me from the faces of sweet young girls.
I the silhouette of a pig in the mild eyes of a camel.
I lie stuck to my bed, covered in sweat as the mattress breathes and groans beneath me.
I have forgotten the names of my own sisters and brothers.
I speak happily, for hours, with my dead mother, whose hand I feel stroke mine, and curse the breath of my father, who is revealed to me as an impostor of the highest order.
I walk in sunlight and feel the hot glare of the moon burn my skin.
I see scorpions the size of men haunting ruins.
I crash into walls I do not see.
I pluck poisonous flowers and dream I boil them for tea.
I spend hours polishing teaspoons I do not need.
I long to dilute my colours with mirages, to make them hot and trembling.

Link to details of Higgie’s Bedlam.
Link to Wikipedia page on Dadd.

Lost in space

What do you do with a psychotic astronaut? If you’re not sure, the Houston Chronicle notes that you can look it up in NASA’s manual for dealing with psychiatric emergencies in space.

Despite being surrounded by billions of dollars of high technology, the procedure is pragmatic and definitely low-tech:

The guidelines were developed to respond to an attempted suicide or severe anxiety, paranoia or hysteria aboard the international space station. Astronauts are instructed to bind the stricken flier’s wrists and ankles with duct tape, restrain the torso with bungee cords and administer strong tranquilizers.

There’s actually a project, named Human Interactions in Space, which specifically studies the psychological impact of space travel, headed up by psychiatrist Dr Nick Kansas.

There are further details of NASA’s policies for psychiatric emergencies in the Houston Chronicle article.

Link to story in Houston Chronicle.

Famous for amnesia and the history of memory

NPR Radio has a fantastic programme that charts the story of famous amnesic patient HM and how research into his impairments have revolutionised the way we understand human memory.

HM became densely amnesic after an operation removed the hippocampus on each side of the brain to treat his otherwise untreatable epilepsy.

Epilepsy can often be triggered by disturbances in the hippocampus, and removing the site of this disturbance is one way of treating life-threatening seizures.

We know now, largely because of HM, that removing one hippocampus has relatively small impact on memory, while removing both causes a profound antereograde amnesia.

This means HM cannot remember new information, meaning that he has relatively normal memory for the time before his operation, but can remember virtually nothing since.

This was one of the first and only times the operation to remove both hippocampi was conducted because of the effects that were discovered.

However, because the removal of the brain areas was done surgically, it allowed a very precise understanding of how the removed areas might contribute to normal memory processes.

A discipline called cognitive neuropsychology studies damage to the brain to work out normal function, by matching up which areas are damaged by what patients can no longer do.

Using these methods, HM has provided a huge insight into the neuropsychology of memory.

The first study on HM was published way back in 1957 [pdf] by brain surgeon William Scoville and neuropsychologist Brenda Milner.

He has been anonymous and kept from the public eye, but his family has now agreed to release audio tapes of him made in the 1990s.

The NPR programme is their first broadcast.

HM is still alive and has been the focus of studies on the neuropsychology of memory until the last paper [pdf] in 2002 although now has reportedly ‘retired’ from research.

Link to ‘H.M.’s Brain and the History of Memory’ with audio.
pdf of first paper on HM by Scoville and Milner.
pdf of 2002 review on HM’s contribution to memory research.