20 years at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit

The Psychologist have just made an article available online that looks at the history an ongoing work of Ediburgh University’s Koestler Parapsychology Unit.

It is one of the few academic parapsychology units in the world and the unit takes pride in a strictly scientific approach to studying the paranormal.

As well as studying whether there is any scientific basis to ‘psi’ phenomena, they also study the psychology of people who believe in the paranormal.

There is now a good body of research suggesting paranormal belief correlates with a number of psychological and neurological factors, such as content-specific reasoning biases and increased temporal lobe activity.

The Psychologist article looks at the history of the unit and how its work has developed since it was founded.

Link to ’20 years at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit’.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Some dialogue from the novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (ISBN 1400040302) by physicist Janna Levin.

In this passage, Kurt G√∂del discusses his objections to Alan Turing’s work on whether the mind can be completely described as a series of computations with his friend Oskar Morgenstern.

“If I die, you must promise to publish my article refuting Alan Turing’s thesis on the limitations of the mind. A Turing machine is a concept, equivalent to a mechanical procedure or algorithm. Turing was able to completely replace reasoning by mechanical operations on formulas – by Turing machines. Good, agreed?

However, are we supposed to equate the human soul with a Turing machine? No. There is a philosophical error in Turing’s work. Turing in his 1937 paper, page 250, gives an argument which is supposed to show that mental procedures cannot go beyond mechanical procedures. However this argument inconclusive. What Turing disregards completely is the fact that mind, in its use, is not static but constantly developing.

They murdered him, you realize?”

“I thought it was suicide,”, Oskar replies absently.

Kurt continues, “The government poisoned his food. I have also been working on a formal proof of the existence of God. But this is unfinished. I don’t want our colleagues to think I am crazy. Maybe you should not published that one if I die.”

Gödel eventually died from starvation, owing to paranoid beliefs about conspiracies and poisoning.

G√∂del’s idea that consciousness is not understandable as a form of computation was further developed by mathematician Roger Penrose in the book Shadows of the Mind (ISBN 0198539789).

Link to excerpt from book.
Link to Janna Levin’s website.

Brain science writing winners announced

The winners for the 2006 National Brain-Science Writing Prize have been announced with the full text of all the winning entries available online.

The first prize for a newspaper article written about the brain was awarded to Rebecca Poole for her article on false memories.

The first prize for an article written by a researcher was awarded to Dr Angelica Ronald for an article looking at the links between ADHD and autism.

The runners-up articles are on the website too, so wander over if you want some more quality neuroscience writing.

Link to 2006 National Brain-Science Writing Prize winners.

Social networks and counter-insurgency

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on a new generation of anthropologist military strategists, such as David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate, who argue that social networks, not ideologies, are key to understanding terrorist campaigns.

Like Kilcullen, [McFate] was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives…

Similarly, Kilkullen has drawn on his own military experiences and research on the role of social groups in insurgencies, and is now responsible for writing counter-insurgency guidelines for deployed soldiers.

One of the most influential sociology papers ever written was Mark Granovetter’s The Strength of Weak Ties (review article at this pdf) which looked at how people were connected in social networks and how this facilitated information exchange, and, consequently, individual goal attainment.

Granovetter demonstrated that ‘strong ties’ (i.e. family and close friends) were actually less important in social networks for getting things done than ‘weak ties’ (i.e. acquaintances) because ‘weak ties’ tend to be people who have different and diverse resources that aren’t in the immediate social group.

This led to the realisation that group structure was important, and, crucially, that these could be analysed using the mathematical tools of graph theory.

Social network theory is now an important and growing area of social psychology and understanding how information flows through social network is thought to be key for making sense of how groups work, co-operate, expand and influence others.

Importantly, this has meant the individualist approach of traditional social psychology (‘how do social groups influence the individual’) and the computational approach of social network theory (‘how does social structure influence information flow’) can be powerfully combined.

Kilkullen argues that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda need to be understood in terms of how their information strategy is being implemented through their social networks, and how they are attempting to recruit collaborators to further their routes of communication.

The article discusses how this has affected US counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency strategy – from global policy to field manuals for company captains.

Perhaps, one take-away message from the piece is just how important social science is becoming to military forces of all persuasions as they increasingly fight through communities rather than for them.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Knowing the Enemy’.

Without music

Amusia is like colour blindness for music. Affected people can’t grasp the subtleties and structure of music despite having having intact hearing. The problems seems to be with the relevant auditory brain systems.

BBC Radio 4 science programme Frontiers recently had an edition on this curious condition that explores the neuroscience of why this occurs and talks to people with the music perception difficulties.

They also link to a musical listening test so you can test your own abilities.

Link to Frontiers page on amusia.
realaudio of programme.
Link to good BBC article on amusia.

Delusions and insight on ABC All in the Mind

The excellent ABC Radio All in the Mind has just had an edition on delusions and insight – examining why people not only have wildly unusual psychotic experiences, but also why they don’t realise these experiences are in any way strange or unusual.

Several people are interviewed who have experienced delusions and psychosis, as well as psychologist Dr Xavier Amador who has extensively written and researched on the topic of insight.

He is co-editor of one of the key books in the field, Insight and Psychosis, and also runs workshops for friends and relatives of people with psychosis.

Insight is a tricky concept, because it is not clear exactly what the person is supposed to have insight into.

It is usually broken down into three factors:

* Does the person believe they have a mental illness?
* Does the person believe the symptoms they are experiencing are due to the mental illness?
* Does the person accept treatment?

Although someone who believes they are dead must be lacking insight into something, the last factor is particularly contentious and there is a degree to which ‘having insight’ is a measure of how much you agree with your psychiatrist.

For example, one measure of insight into the negative symptoms of schizophrenia is to ask the person to fill out a subjective rating of their symptoms, and compared it to the same rating completed by the psychiatrist.

The difference in score is supposed to represent the extent of the patients lack of insight, but it could just as easily represent the psychiatrist’s lack of insight into the patient’s condition.

It is also not clear how the lack of insight in psychotic mental illness links to lack of insight after brain injury – known as anosognosia.

This can be so striking that a person with paralysis or even blindness after brain injury may be completely unaware that they can no longer move or see.

All in the Mind discusses how it’s possible to help someone who believes there is nothing wrong with them, even when there’s a clear difference in the perception of reality.

Link to All in the Mind on insight and psychosis.

Happy seasonal festival of your adopted social context

The Christmas holidays are approaching and I suspect updates to Mind Hacks will be a little sporadic over the next week or two.

Hopefully we’ll manage some posts but I’m not sure how internet access will work out as we travel about spreading good cheer (or, alternatively, we might just be travelling about).

Enjoy yourself, wherever and whoever you are!

Everything begins with an EEG

The most important application of brain-machine interfaces is to allow paralysed people the ability to control their environment.

The second most important application, is, of course, to create psychedelic rave visuals to accompany pumping acid techno.

Mind VJ is a project by Lenara Verle and Marlon Barrios-Solano that has filled this neglected area of research by designing an EEG-based system that creates intense visuals in response to electrical brain changes.

In MIND VJ, the idea is to use the rhythm of our own brain waves as the conducting element for the performance. In this manner, we can tap into a normally “hidden” area of our body (brain function and its electrical activity) and make it “visible” in the form of projected images. In this case, the images projected won’t be wave graphs, like the ones usually plotted by medical EEG machines, but artistic images, undergoing real-time changes and manipulations controlled by the current brain wave output of the subject (the MIND VJ)

Provocatively, The MIND VJ project references thoughts of utopian cyber dreams about the ultimate direct brain to computer interface, and on the other side brings paranoid ideas of “mind reading” and “mind control”.

I think we can guess where the drugs kicked in when they were writing that bit of text.

There’s more about the project on their website and a video of Mind VJ in action.

Apparently the project is still in progress and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Link to Mind VJ.

The Violent Brain in new SciAmMind

A new Scientific American Mind has arrived and two of the feature articles are available online – one of which is on the neuroscience of violence.

The article makes a fantastic complement to the Science News article on psychopaths we featured previously.

It touches on psychopathy, but is more focused on the wider issues of non-psychopathic violence that could be triggered in anyone in the population.

Some people in the population engage in more violent acts than others and much research has focused on what are the social and biological risk factors that distinguish high from low-violence individuals.

The frontal lobes seems important as neural circuits here seem to be involved in preventing impulsive acts.

People who experience an abusive or impoverished childhood are also known to be at higher risk for violence, and it is possible that these experiences shape the function of the relevant circuits in the brain as it develops.

Genetics also plays a part, and recent findings that a version of a gene known as MAOA is linked to violence suggests that we may partly inherit a ‘violence threshold’. Brain Ethics has a fantastic article on this research if you want to know more.

The article also talks about the Dunedin project, an important and long-running study on development and psychopathology that has provided a huge amount of data in this, and many other areas.

The December edition of SciAmMind also has articles on the military applications of neuroscience, which we featured previously on Mind Hacks, and a number of articles only available to subscribers or in the print edition.

These include articles on migraine, hearing voices, cooperation, crying, brain-scan lie detecting and whether the teen brain is too rational.

UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that there’s a great article on Cognitive Daily examining a recent study on the interaction between guns, aggression and testosterone.

Link to SciAmMind article ‘The Violent Brain’.

Eli Lilly antipsychotic drug storm continues

The New York Times have published a second article based on internal documents from drug company Eli Lilly over the promotion of an antipsychotic medication known as Zyprexa or olanzapine – this time claiming that Eli Lilly have been deliberately promoting the drug for unlicensed conditions.

When a drug is ‘licensed’, this is not a license to prescribe the drug, but a license for the drug company to advertise it for a specific condition.

For example, olanzapine is licensed for schizophrenia, meaning it can be advertised as treatment for this condition.

However, doctors have the freedom to prescribe the drug for anything they want to if they think it will help. This is known as ‘off-label’ prescribing.

Promoting ‘off-label’ prescribing is illegal, however, and the article in the New York Times suggests Eli Lilly has been doing exactly this by marketing the use of olanzapine for dementia and undiagnosed psychotic symptoms.

This campaign was allegedly targeted at ‘primary care physicians’ (i.e. GPs or non-specialist doctors) rather than specialists.

In terms of marketing, pharmaceutical companies often consider GPs to be soft targets as they have to know ‘a little about a lot’, and so are more likely to be persuaded by selective data on a particular topic.

From the article:

The documents also show that Lilly encouraged primary care doctors to treat the symptoms and behaviors of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder even if the doctors had not actually diagnosed those diseases in their patients. Lilly’s market research had found that many primary care doctors did not consider themselves qualified to treat people with schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder.

In response to these and previous allegation made by the New York Times, Eli Lilly have issued a statement denying any wrongdoing and have suggested that the allegations are based on an unrepresentative selection of company documents:

The Times failed to mention that these leaked documents are a tiny fraction of the more than 11 million pages of documents provided by Lilly as part of the litigation process. They do not accurately portray Lilly’s conduct. As part of Lilly’s commitment to patients and healthcare professionals, many high-level Lilly physicians and researchers — along with researchers from outside Lilly — were engaged for a number of years to study the issue of Zyprexa and diabetes. Leaked documents involving these discussions do not represent an accurate view of company strategy or conduct.

Link to NYT article ‘Drug Files Show Maker Promoted Unapproved Use’.
Link to response from Eli Lilly.

A Place for Consciousness

A new edition of hardcore consciousness research journal Psyche has just been released online with a special issue focusing on consciousness, causation and the links to the physical structure of the brain.

All the papers are freely available online, and address the arguments put forward in philosopher Gregg Rosenberg’s influential book A Place for Consciousness (ISBN 0195168143).

Rosenberg has a page about the book, with several of the key chapters available online.

In fact, for those wanting a quick overview of his theory, he’s put together some PowerPoint slides which explain the key points in nine easy steps.

The new edition of Psyche examines Rosenberg’s arguments in some detail, as the link between consciousness and brain function, and the causal role of mental phenomena are two of the most important and difficult parts of modern consciousness research.

Link to Psyche.
Link to page on Rosenberg’s book with chapters and summary.

Vegetarians have higher childhood IQ

…although a third seem to suffer from conceptual problems! A paper published this week by the British Medical Journal report that children with higher IQs tend to go on to become vegetarian.

Adults who classified themselves as vegetarian tended to be five points higher in IQ when they were tested at age 10.

Interestingly, the results remained stable after education and social class were controlled for.

However, a third of people who classified themselves as vegetarian ate chicken or fish, suggesting most people work with a reasonably flexible definition.

This study is from a research group in Southhampton who are looking at the link between childhood factors and adult brain development.

We recently reported on an earlier study on childhood head size and IQ.

Link to write-up from BBC News.
Link to abstract from the BMJ.

Build your own brain stimulator

OpenStim is a community that aims to develop a magnetic brain stimulator which you can build and use in your own home.

The technique is known as ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation’ or TMS. In essence, TMS is a powerful computer controlled electromagnet that sends focused magnetic pulses into the brain.

The magnetic field induces a current in the neurons, which then become stimulated as a result.

This can be used to alter the brain in specific ways, either activating or deactivating certain areas of the cortex.

This is often used for neuroscience research. For example, if you suspect that a certain brain area is involved during a certain task, you can alter the function of the brain area and see if participants perform the task any differently.

Existing research has used this technique and has shown that stimulating certain areas improves mood or, in some instances, cognitive performance.

The OpenStim project states their aims as:

1. Create a community that designs the core technology for a safe, highly functional, inexpensive, efficacious noninvasive transcranial magnetic stimulator (TMS) device for stimulating the central nervous system.

2. Facilitate experimentation and exchange of ideas, on the topic of modulation of brain function in a variety of people and contexts, so that we can learn more about the neural circuits mediating our subjective experiences, and improve mental functions (aka hacking your brain).

Although they aim to build a “safe” device, I can’t actually see anything on their site which specifies exactly what they define as safe.

In the research, TMS most commonly refers to specifically designed high powered electromagnets that pump out about 1-1.5 Tesla of field strength in millisecond bursts.

This is very powerful, although because of the thickness of the skull and the need to use only the most focused part of the magnetic field, it is only enough to reliably discharge a few centimetres square of neurons just below the skull.

However, a significant danger is that with enough pulses, a seizure is triggered.

Most of the protocols in the TMS literature and research centres are designed to avoid this. When these limits are adhered to, TMS is very safe and no long-lasting effects have been found.

However, even if you make sure you keep within the accepted ‘safe limits’ for TMS stimulation, with home-built kit you are less likely to be sure that your equipment is genuinely doing what it is supposed to.

In other words, builder beware! Your brain is fragile, so make sure you know the risks before altering it in anyway.

Link to OpenStim project.

Light sleep

A poem on the collective unconsciousness of sleep by British poet John Hegley:

Light Sleep

Early in the evening I like to have a kip and dip
into the pool of communal unconcious;
resting, passive,
where whatever size of a drip you are
you make the whole
more massive.

Hegley’s poems are a mixture of the whimsical, insightful and touching. We’ve featured the Hegley poem ‘Outsider art’ previously on Mind Hacks.

The woman who thinks like a cow

Google Video seems to have the full length documentary on Prof Temple Grandin, a world expert on animal science who was diagnosed with autism as a child.

As well as her academic work which has been hugely influential around the world, she has also written several books on the psychology of autism that have become widely read by professionals and the public alike.

Her story first became known as she was included as a case study in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book An Anthropologist on Mars.

Interestingly, Grandin suggests that her autism helps her understand animals, as she suggests they have similar styles of thinking in some instances.

In the programme, Grandin explains her work and views on autism. Furthermore, the documentary highlights her as a bright and engaging person, far from the usual stereotypes of autistic people.

Link to video of ‘The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow’.
Link to Prof Temple Grandin’s website.