Cognitive biases and the start of war

Foreign Policy magazine has an article by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon on the role of cognitive biases in the decision to go to war.

Kahneman is a nobel prize winning psychologist known for his work on decision making and Renshon is a political scientist and author of the book Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (ISBN 0275990850).

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

The article is an interesting attempt to apply knowledge of cognitive biases to understanding political decision making in high stress, high stakes situations.

This is an area which is becoming increasingly important in military psychology. Both to understand how individual soldiers might make battlefield decisions, and how leaders might make strategic choices during conflict.

Link to article ‘Why Hawks Win’ (via Frontal Cortex).

Psychiatry on the move

The Royal College of Psychiatrists is now releasing ‘continuing professional development’ podcasts, which sound dull, but are actually fascinating discussions of new and developing issues in psychology and psychiatry.

CPD is a requirment for clinicians to make sure they keep training throughout their careers. It is designed to update them up with the latest developments in their field.

The CPD podcasts take the form of extended interviews with people who are also interviewed for the British Journal of Psychiatry podcasts we featured previously.

In the CPD podcasts, however, the discussion focuses on related psychological or neuroscientific theories and the how they can be apply to clinical situations.

With the additional material on the site, British psychiatrists can then take an accredited test to demonstrate their learning.

Despite being aimed at qualified psychiatrists, the discussions are remarkably accessible.

Recent programmes have tackled the neuropsychology of empathy, whether trials for psychiatric drugs are truly objective, and making judgements of someone’s future risk for violence.

Link to psychiatry CPD podcasts.

Brain fitness carnival

The brain fitness freaks at cognitive enhancement blog Sharp Brains have launched a Brain Fitness carnival so they can create a regular digest of self-submitted online articles.

The first edition is due out on Friday January 17th so get your submissions sent in if you want to be included.

Sharp Brains is also a company that wants to develop commercial mental exercise programmes based on sound science to help improve and maintain cognitive function.

They even envisage ‘Brain Gyms’ so you could drop in after work and pump some mental iron:

We at SharpBrains believe that Brain Fitness will grow one day to become as widespread as physical fitness, and that Brain Fitness Centers or “brain gyms” will complement today’s gyms.

Ha! Make a (NSFW) sexy pop video out of that one Eric Prydz!

Link to details of the upcoming Brain Fitness carnival.
Link to carnival homepage.

New season of BBC All in the Mind kicks off

A new season of the BBC radio programme All in the Mind (not to be confused with the Australian ABC Radio programme of the same name) has just started and you can listen to the archives online.

The BBC version, to be fair, is a little more starched than the Aussie version, but covers a wider range of topics each week.

The first edition, broadcast just before Christmas, looked at the impact of reality TV on children who have been the subject of such TV programmes, and visits a unique suicide prevention drop-in centre.

The second in the series, broadcast tonight and available online from tomorrow evening, looks at false confessions and whether we all have think of the same colour when we think of a colour word.

It will also discuss the technology behind neurofeedback – a technique for ‘training the brain’ by turning EEG signals into something you can monitor and, therefore, learn to change.

As the technology has become cheaper, neurofeedback is becoming big business, with some dubious claims being made on its behalf (as a web search demonstrates).

However, despite the wild promises of some unscrupulous clinics, there is some sound science behind it and some early evidence it might help to improve certain mental abilities.

There’s even a game – Mindball – that you can play purely with the power of thought. All in the Mind tries it out!

Link to BBC All in the Mind website with audio.

Music of the Hemispheres

There’s a great piece in The New York Times on Prof Daniel Levitin and the rapidly developing research field tackling the cognitive neuroscience of music.

We’ve covered material related to Levitin’s recently-released book This is Your Brain on Music (ISBN 0525949690) before, but the NYT article goes into a little more detail into some of the scientific findings than previous articles.

Letivin is an ex-rock producer who eventually became disillusioned with the music industry but maintained his love of music through his work as a neuropsychologist.

For his first experiment he came up with an elegant concept: He stopped people on the street and asked them to sing, entirely from memory, one of their favorite hit songs. The results were astonishingly accurate. Most people could hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent margin of error, and two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch, a level of accuracy that wouldn’t embarrass a pro.

“When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual recording of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,” Dr. Levitin said.

It was a remarkable feat. Most memories degrade and distort with time; why would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because music triggers the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last year [pdf] Dr. Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how.

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense of reward.

His book got a glowing review from Salon, although I’ve yet to find any reviews in the academic literature.

However, Levitin’s website has a huge amount of information on it, including the audio of interviews he’s done and the full text of all his papers, so is well worth a visit if you’re interested in checking out the area.

UPDATE: Dr Levitin emailed to say the book has indeed been reviewed in the academic literature. A review that appeared in the journal Cerebrum is available online as a pdf. Enjoy!

Link to NYT article ‘Music of the Hemispheres’ (via BrainWaves).
Link to Salon review of ‘This is Your Brain on Music’.
Link to Levitin’s website.

Brain Surgery – Live on the Wireless!

The always excellent ABC Radio All in the Mind has just had a particularly compelling edition where they covered a neurosurgery operation to fix a particularly dangerous type of problem – an arteriovenous malformation or AVM – in a young woman named Kia.

An AVM is a tangle of veins and arteries meaning that the usually separate arterial (oxygen rich) and venous (oxygen depleted) blood can become mixed or doesn’t flow properly.

The problem is usually present from birth owing to a problem in development, and when intact, might not cause any noticeable symptoms.

However, AVMs are known to be fragile and there is a high risk that the AVM might bleed or cause an aneurysm – potentially causing death or serious brain injury.

Therefore, if treatable (and some are so big, complex or fragile that they can’t be treated) surgeons will often opt to risk an operation to remove the AVM to prevent any catastrophes in the future.

You’d think that radio wouldn’t be a good medium to cover a surgical procedure but the programme makes for compelling listening as the neurosurgeon, Professor Jeffrey Rosenfeld, narrates each stage as the operation progresses.

The patient and other staff also describe their hopes and fears, as well as their role in the treatment.

One of the most striking things is the sound of the drill as it cuts into the skull.

Link to AITM on ‘Brain Surgery – Live on the Wireless!’

Putting the fun in dysfunctional

I’ve just found an interesting letter to the British Journal of Psychiatry by A. J. McBride who noted the high level of mental illness in professional comedians.

Perhaps most well-known is the British comedian Spike Milligan who suffered from bipolar disorder and was frequently admitted to hospital.

In fact, a ward at the Maudsley Hospital in London, where he was admitted at least once, was opened by Spike. A plaque still commemorates the occasion.

The letter in the BJP was a comment on an earlier paper that noted the exceptionally high level of mental illness among jazz musicians.

Link to BJP letter on mental illness in comedians.
Link to BJP paper on mental illness in jazz musicians.

the society of mind

minsky.jpgMarvin Minksy, one of the founding figures in Artificial Intelligence, in his Society of Mind (1985):

People ask if machines have souls. And I ask back whether souls can learn. It does not seem a fair exchange – if souls can live for endless time and yet not use that time to learn – to trade all change for changelessness. And that’s exactly what we get with inborn souls that cannot grow: a destiny the same as death, an ending in a permanence incapable of any change and, hence, devoid of intellect.

…

We start as little embryos, which then build great and wonderous selves – whose merit lies entirely within their own coherancy. The value of a human self lies not in some small, precious core, but in its vast constructed crust

What are those old and fierce beliefs in spirits, souls, and essences? They’re all insinuation that we’re helpless to improve ourselves. To look for our virtues in such thoughts seems just as wrongly aimed a search as seeking art in canvas cloths by scraping off the painter’s works.

Art for all senses

Seed Magazine has an article on Marcia Smilack – a photographer and video artist with a rare form of synaesthesia in which all her senses intermingle.

Smilack aims to capture this experience in her work and express it for people without the condition.

The article discusses why art may be such a good expression of synaesthetic experiences and describes some current research that demonstrates that synaesthetes’ drawings of music were also thought to be a ‘better match’ by people without the condition.

This perhaps suggests that we all have some sort of innate ability to make sense of inter-sensory cross-overs.

Smilack’s films are a particularly striking attempt to capture part of the experience.

The video for Coldcut’s Music 4 No Musicians always struck me as particularly synaesthetic if you’re after an interesting (and very mellow) attempt to link sound and vision.

Link to Seed article ‘The Most Beautiful Painting You’ve Ever Heard’.
Link to Marcia Smilack’s website.
Link to Coldcut’s Music 4 No Musicians (takes a while to get going).

Prison officers issued knives to ‘cut suicide rate’

In a wonderfully twisted solution to poor mental health care, prison officers in UK’s Winchester Prison are being issued knives in an attempt to reduce suicide rates by allowing them to cut down prisoners they find hanging in their cells.

Mental health care in prison is notoriously bad (a recent reported noted one third of UK young offenders are mentally ill), and many operate as little more than surrogate psychiatric facilities – without the psychiatry or the facilities. There is a similar situation in the USA.

I’ve spent some time trying to track down the latest reports on HMP Winchester but with very little success, although from what I can find Winchester seems to be a particularly bad example.

This news story incidentally mentions that a recent report “attacks the policy of keeping people with mental health problems locked up in prison healthcare wings when they should be receiving treatment from trained staff.”

This written response to a 2001 parliamentary request for a information on suicide rates in the prison shows them spiralling out of control to almost eight times the national average. More recent figures show it to have one of the highest number of prison suicides in the country.

The spectacularly broken website of the Independent Monitoring Board, the body that reports on prison conditions, lists the last published annual report as 2004.

This report notes that “The problem of prisoners with severe mental disabilities is raised time and time again” and also notes the lack of mental health care facilities “leaves Prison Officers no choice but to deal with these prisoners even though they are not medically trained so to do”.

It seems prison suicides have been a more recent matter of parliamentary concern and the actual prevention guidelines (which seem remarkably sensible) are available online as a Word doc.

Link to article ‘Prison issue knives to officers to cut suicide rate’ from Hampshire News (via TWS).

Beautiful images from PsicoCaf√©

I’ve stumbled across a wonderful collection of mind and brain artwork, collected by the author of the Italian website PsicoCaf√©.

Unfortunately, my Italian isn’t what it should be but the site’s blog is updated daily, has a podcast and video section, and, not surprisingly, looks beautiful.

If your language doesn’t hold out, however, the image gallery is well worth a browse as it’s quite a stunning collection.

Link to PsicoCafé image gallery.
Link to PsicoCafé.

The buzzing blooming life of William James

The Boston Globe has a review of a new biography of William James. He is often called the ‘father of modern psychology’ and is equally well-known for his work in philosophy.

Not quite as well-known is his drug-experimentation, fascination with parapsychology and interest in numerous women.

It’s almost a clich√© that psychology talks will start with a quote from James. Largely because his work, most notably the book The Principles of Psychology, touched upon almost every area now part of mainstream cognitive science.

His interests were truly eclectic, however, and his writing explores a diverse range of thoughts and experiences.

One of my favourite James quotes is a sentence he wrote after taking nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas’), recorded in an essay on the experience:

“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”

James also experienced terrible depressions and suicidal thoughts throughout his life, giving him first hand experience of a mind gone awry.

Perhaps a combination of natural curiosity and an interest in altered states led James to radical and still-influential theories of mental life.

A recent review from The New York Times summed it up like so:

It is hard to maintain the illusion of the disembodied philosopher in the face of this larger-than-life and fascinatingly cracked personality, who pragmatically turned the very fissures of his soul into metaphysical positions.

There’s more in the reviews, and the book itself, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (ISBN 0618433252), has recently hit the shelves.

Link to Boston Globe review of James biography (via 3Q).
Link to review from LA Times.
Link to extensive review from The New York Times.

Confabulated Memory t-shirt

Online t-shirt retailer and design free-for-all Threadless have just released a t-shirt based on the theme of ‘confabulated memory’.

In neuropsychology, ‘confabulation’ usually refers to a condition where people produce streams of false memories.

It is distinguished from lying in that affected people do not seem to be intentionally trying to deceive. In fact, they seem to have little control over their recall.

Although we all confabulate without realising it to some degree, the clinical condition is most striking after brain injury.

The following example is from a study on a 56 year-old man who developed the condition after brain surgery to remove a tumour.

You were at school together?
We still are.

You and Val? Really? I didn’t know that. When you say you still are, do you mean you are still at school now?
Well not at school, at university.

Oh. So the two of you are at university together?
Yes. She is doing third year and I am doing computers.

The t-shirt is a wonderful graphic portrayal of this free-wheeling fountain of memories with themes mingling and overlapping in a confused and chaotic state.

Link to Threadless t-shirt ‘Confabulated Memory’.

Understanding burnout (Santa take note)

“In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith”. The New York Magazine has an in-depth article on the psychology of burn-out.

Burnout is not its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s not something that can be treated pharmacologically; it is not considered the same thing as depression or a midlife crisis, though sometimes they coincide. The term was first coined by a psychotherapist named Herbert Freudenberger, who himself probably took it from Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case. (“I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings,” the book’s numb protagonist, Querry, wrote in his journal, “to do anything for them out of pity.”) While working at a free clinic for drug addicts in Haight-Ashbury, Freudenberger noticed that the volunteers, when discouraged, would often push harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as if they were achieving less and less. The result, in 1974, was the book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement. Others soon followed. A subspecialty of psychology was born.

Isn’t Freudenberger just the best name for a psychotherapist?

Link to article ‘Can‚Äôt Get No Satisfaction’.