Deep brain electrodes – from the inside

Wired magazine has a fascinating feature article about an operation to implant deep brain stimulation electrodes in a patient with Parkinson’s disease. Crucially, the article is written the patient himself.

Deep brain stimulation involves inserting permanent electrodes into the brain to pump tiny pulses of electricity into key areas.

It’s most commonly used as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease which causes problems with the ‘motor loop’ – a network of brain areas that control movement (actually there are two main ones, the direct and indirect).

This is why patients with Parkinson’s disease have trouble moving and have a visible tremor.

The loops consist of a series of areas that might boost activity or reduce activity in subsequent parts of the loop.

Damage to any of these areas might mean that the following area might not get enough activation (like with a faulty accelerator), or might be too active because it is not being damped down correctly (like with a faulty brake).

Neurosurgeons can try and restore balance in this loop by either damping down an area by surgery (e.g. a pallidotomy) or by increasing activation at an area by deep brain stimulation.

This is exactly the treatment that Steven Guile, the author of the Wired article, describes.

I’ll be kept awake for the entire procedure. During the surgery I will talk and move my limbs on command, which helps Team Hubris know which part of my brain is being poked.

Unfortunately, this also means I’m conscious when [neurosurgeon] Henderson produces what looks like a hand drill and uses it to burr two dime-sized holes into the top of my skull. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s loud.

Team Hubris is installing a deep brain stimulator, essentially a neurological pacemaker, in my head. This involves threading two sets of stiff wires in through my scalp, through my cerebrum ‚Äî most of my brain ‚Äî and into my subthalamic nucleus, a target the size of a lima bean, located near the brain stem. Each wire is a little thinner than a small, unfolded paper clip, with four electrodes at one end. The electrodes will eventually deliver small shocks to my STN. How did I get into this mess? Well, I have Parkinson’s disease. If the surgery works, these wires will continually stimulate my brain in an attempt to relieve my symptoms.

The article is a wonderful tale of neurosurgery from the inside and a great guide to some of the science and medicine of the condition.

There’s also a fantastic a video segment where Gulie narrates and explains the operation.

Link to Wired article ‘A Shock to the System’ (via Neurophilosopher).

All in the Mind on the Zyprexa saga

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind has broadcast a special on the legal case and previously secret Eli Lilly documents that just came to light on antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, also known as olanzapine, one of the most profitable drugs in the world.

We’ve been keeping track of the story here at Mind Hacks, as it was first picked up by The New York Times and disseminated across the world.

A lot of the digging on the story has been done by investigative journalist Philip Dawdy who has been publishing his revelations on mental health blog Furious Seasons.

He also published copies of the previously secret Eli Lilly documents that seem to suggest that the drug company tried to promote olanzapine inappropriately and obscure information about the drugs negative health effects.

As well as covering the accusations and revelation, All in the Mind also gets Eli Lilly’s response, who have categorically denied any wrong-doing and give a spirited defence on the programme.

Link to AITM on ‘The Zyprexa story’.

Memory and the parietal lobe

Science and Consciousness Review has a new feature article by staff writer Alice Kim discussing the role of the parietal lobe in memory.

The parietal lobe is typically linked to the representation of the body, and space in relation to the body, so it might be surprising that this area is being linked to more general memory abilities.

There is now a growing body of evidence for the importance of parietal areas in remembering and the article takes an in-depth look at what the scientific studies are telling us about how it all fits together.

Presumably, the author is not the same Alice Kim who is married to Nicolas Cage, but you can never be too sure.

Link to SCR article ‘The potential role of the parietal lobe in episodic memory and other cognitive functions’.

Expertise vs Randomness

A widely cited result asserts that experts superiority over novices in recalling meaningful material from their domain of expertise vanishes when random material is used. A review of recent chess experiments where random positions served as control material (presentation time between 3 and 10 seconds) shows, however, that strong players generally maintain some superiority over weak players even with random positions, although the relative difference between skill levels is much smaller than with game positions

Gobet, F. & Simon, H. A. (1996). Recall of rapidly presented random chess positions is a function of skill. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3, 159-163.

Preprint as Word Doc
Gobet’s bibliography here

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.