Wittgenstein and wisdom

British philosophy magazine Philosophy Now has a special edition on that most psychological of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, with several of the feature articles freely available online.

Wittgenstein is known as much for his character as his philosophy, and for those not familiar with his life Tim Madigan’s short introduction is a good place to start.

If you want to get your teeth into some of the philosophical ideas, Mark Jago has written a remarkably clear guide to Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language.

There’s more articles available if you pick up a copy of the magazine or have online access.

If you get a chance to see the magazine itself (a bit difficult to get hold of as many shops don’t carry it) you’ll notice that Philosophy Now is exactly what you’d expect from a philosophy magazine: a bit chaotic, endearingly eccentric and wonderfully intellectual.

Otherwise, you could do much worse than listening to a fantastic edition of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time that tackled the life and philosophy of Wittgenstein, archived online.

Link to Philosophy Now.
Link to Wikipedia page on Wittgenstein.
Link to In Our Time on Wittgenstein (with realaudio link).

‘Mass hysteria’ closes school

Yesterday, ‘mass hysteria’ closed a school in Barnsley. According to an article in The Times, 30 or so pupils began feeling ill after watching a widely used biology video, and as other pupils heard about the malady, the effect spread.

The school officials eventually gathered everyone together in the school hall suspecting a gas leak, and paramedics advised the school should be closed.

The original class were taken to hospital, but no signs of physical illness have been reported and no gas leak has been found. The episode has been put down to ‘mass hysteria’.

Mass hysteria is typically called ‘mass sociogenic illness’ in the research literature and was the subject of a fascinating 2002 article by sociologist Robert Bartholomew and psychiatrist Simon Wessley.

This article was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry and charts the history of mass sociogenic illness from the middle ages to the present day.

The authors also note some of the tell-tale signs that distinguish sociogenic illness from genuine mass poisoning, and suggest there are two main types:

“Wessely (1987) identifies two types of mass sociogenic illness ‚Äî ‘mass anxiety hysteria’ and ‘mass motor hysteria’. The former is of shorter duration, typically one day, and involves sudden, extreme anxiety following the perception of a false threat. The second category is typified by the slow accumulation of pent-up stress, is confined to an intolerable social setting and is characterised by dissociation, histrionics and alterations in psychomotor activity (e.g. shaking, twitching, contractures), usually persisting for weeks or months.”

Batholomew has written a completely enthralling book on this subject called Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illnesses and Social Delusion (ISBN 0786409975) which comes highly recommended both as a guide to this medical curiosity, and as a tour through the more unusual aspects of our social psychology.

Link to Times article ‘Mass hysteria forces evacuation of school’.
Link to BJP article ‘Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness’.

Through the eyes of a psychopath

A recent brain imaging study has suggested that criminal psychopaths do not show the normal neurological reaction to seeing fear in other people’s faces.

Contrary to the media depiction, a diagnosis of clinical psychopathy does not necessarily describe someone who enjoys sadistic violence, but instead describes an aggressive or antisocial person who also seems to have shallow emotions, manipulates others, and has a lack of guilt and empathy for victims.

These traits are usually measured by the use of a diagnostic checklist called the PCL-R.

One of the theories of psychopathy suggests that we learn to avoid treating others badly because their negative emotional reaction is also unpleasant for us.

Psychopaths, so the theory goes, lack the ability to perceive distress in others, and so have less reason to avoid treating others badly if it serves their needs.

A group of researchers, led by Dr Quinton Deeley, tested this theory by brain-scanning 15 psychopaths and 9 healthy controls while they viewed happy, sad and neutral faces.

The participants were asked to indicate whether the faces were male or female as a way of focusing participants on the faces and testing whether they could identify faces adequately, but the real comparison was for their reaction to different emotional expressions.

The researchers found that people with psychopathy show reduced activation in brain areas linked to vision and face perception in response to fearful faces, and surprisingly, also to happy faces.

They also showed less activation to fearful faces compared to neutral faces, which was the reverse of the pattern found in control participants.

These results suggest that psychopathy may involve a problem with identifying others’ emotional reaction that is particularly apparent for fearful faces.

However, a previous study with psychopaths reported that they do not show the same fearful response to mild pain when compared to controls, suggesting that the effect may not be specific to faces but a more general problem with fear-based learning.

Whether the problem with identifying fear in other people’s faces is a part of this, or an additional problem, remains to be seen.

It is known that both genetics and early life experiences, such as coming from a broken home, experiencing physical punishment and anti-social parenting, can contribute to psychopathy.

What remains to be answered is how much of the differences in brain function are due to inherited traits, and how much are the result of the brain developing in response to early experiences.

UPDATE: Dr Quinton Deeley discusses emotion recognition and psychopaths in the December Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast. The interview starts 27 mins 35 secs in.

Link to abstract of scientific study.
Link to write-up from BBC News.

2006-12-08 Spike activity

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

SciAm has an article on research looking at the mathematical structure of neuroscience. Much more at this pdf.

Antidepressants can can improve your sense of taste, reports New Scientist. Obviously, this more than makes up for the antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction.

The Neurocritic discusses research on memory that has used some cutting-edge neuroscience technology in the process.

Nature reports that the ‘fear centre’ (the what? oh, they mean the amygdala) is smaller in the brains of people with severe autism.

Neurofuture has a great article on the first neurosurgery-by-wire operation, and how the technique is developing.

The New York Times has an in-depth article on ‘seasonal affective disorder’.

Brain Ethics has lept back into life.

New mothers are four times more likely to become mentally ill than other women, reports The Boston Globe.

Dig that old school brain technology over at OmniBrain.

The future exists today. It’s just unevenly distributed

If you were wondering where it had got to, it looks like the annual ‘brain scan predicts schizophrenia’ story has arrived. If you’re feeling a bit nostalgic, have a look back at some past classics.

It’s not that these studies don’t show any predictive value of brain scans, but so far, none have proved reliable enough to be even slightly useful in clinical practice.

It’s also likely that brain scans will never predict schizophrenia 100%, because the evidence suggests that schizophrenia isn’t a single cut-and-dry condition, like the flu or arthritis – it’s just a vaguely described set of experiences that tend to occur together and often cause the person distress or impairment.

In fact, two people could have schizophrenia and not share any symptoms. In other words, there’s little that’s definitive and definite to predict.

Now, if only brain scans could predict when journalists will write a ‘brain scans predict’ article, then we might be able to intervene with the appropriate help.

UPDATE: There’s some good comments on this post, and CopperKettle has provided a link to the full paper.

Link to BBC News story “Scans ‘can predict schizophrenia'”.

Think fast feel great

Cognitive Daily has a great review of an intriguing study that suggests that thinking quickly could boost your mood.

People with mania, a state of uncontrollably ‘high’ mood, often say they have racing thoughts, and people with depression sometimes feel as if their thoughts are slowed, impaired or sluggish.

Psychologists Emily Pronin and Daniel Wegner decided to see whether they could influence mood by changing how fast people think.

They asked participants to read text at different speeds then asked them to rate their mood afterwards. People who had read text at the fastest speeds, reported a lift in mood.

The study involved some more comprehensive investigations, and there’s more at Cognitive Daily if you want the nitty gritty.

Link to ‘Depressed? Think faster thoughts, and your mood may improve’.

Phineas Gage and the rod of iron

The Neurophilosopher has written a great introduction to the history and science of Phineas Gage – one of the most famous cases in the history of neurology.

In 1848, Gage was a railroad worker who had the sort of job that sounds like it was designed for the Darwin awards: he was paid to drill holes in large rocks, fill them with gunpowder and pack it down with a large iron rod.

Not surprisingly, the gunpowder eventually ignited, sending the tamping iron through Gage’s skull.

Remarkably, Gage survived, but not without significant damage to his frontal lobes.

Gage seemed to show some changes in character (although the exactly details are still somewhat controversial), and this was one of the first clues that specific areas of the brain may be involved in specific mental functions.

More recently, scientific studies have been completed to work out the path of the iron through his skull, to understand exactly how the brain was affected.

Neurophilosopher has video of the computer reconstructions created by these studies, and discusses some of the historical details of the incident.

Link to ‘The incredible case of Phineas Gage’.
Link to Wikipedia page on Phineas Gage.

Hobbes, the first functionalist?

leviathan.jpgIf you thought that the founders of the Artificial Intelligence movement were the first to think that intelligence was just the product of computation, think again:


When man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total, from addition of parcels….For reason, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 5 ‘Of Reason and Science’

Ketamine dreams

An excerpt from a letter to this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry on the effects of ketamine and the similarities and differences with psychosis, by Drs James Stone and Lyn Pilowsky:

“We also recently studied healthy volunteers following ketamine administration… Most experienced severe distortions of time, believing that a minute was several hours in duration. They also showed blunting of affect and loss of emotional reactivity. A few showed a marked disinhibition, with facetious replies to questions and apparent euphoria in the first 10‚Äì20 min after administration of ketamine. Several participants reported the belief that they were composed solely of thoughts, and that their bodies had either become nonexistent or were separate from them. One reported that he believed he could control people in the room by pointing with his hands, and another reported persecutory delusions.”

Link to full letter from December’s BJP.

Good and evil in the practice of neuroscience

ABC Radio’s The Philosopher’s Zone had an edition last week on ‘neuroethics’ – the branch of moral philosophy that deals with the difficult issues raised by our increasing ability to manipulate the brain.

For example, a lab at Georgia Tech have created The Hybrot, a robot controlled by the brain cells of a rat.

Some might question whether it is ethical to use sentient creatures for parts in mechanical devices.

If you have no ethical qualms about this, what about using human brain cells to do the job, donated by a card-carrying organ donor after an irreversible coma?

Perhaps it would make a difference what the device was, so a medical device to help someone move again might be acceptable, but an intelligent house-cleaning robot might seem too trivial to make human brain cells an acceptable component.

The Philosopher’s Zone examines neuroethics as a new discipline that aims to make sense of similarly taxing situations, often faced by clinicians and scientists in their day-to-day work.

If you’re interested in hearing more, Dana hosted a public panel discussion on these issues last year, and have put the video online.

Link to The Philosopher’s Zone on neuroethics.
Link to Dana panel discussion on neuroethics.

Drinking the milk of paradise

The opening of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Coleridge claimed he wrote the poem after experiencing a vision during an opium-induced sleep, but was woken by a ‘person from Porlock’ before it was complete.

Coleridge’s biographer, Richard Holmes, suggests that because we tend to remember dreams best when we’re woken in their midst, rather than cutting short the poetic inspiration, the ‘person from Porlock’ may have actually saved this vision from sinking into the depths of unconsciousness.

However, it’s not clear whether the vision genuinely occurred as Coleridge claimed, so this remains speculation.

If you’re interested in a more in-depth analysis of this poem that Coleridge called a “a psychological curiosity”, there’s an excellent article in the PsyArt journal that examines it using a number of cognitive and psychological theories.

Link to full text of Kubla Khan.
Link to article on the poem from PsyArt.

Psychic epilepsy healing

Neurologists of the world rejoice. The chap at Extrasensory Epilepsy Healing can cure epilepsy with the power of his mind, and takes all types of credit cards over the internet.

If this isn’t revelation enough, it turns out that epilepsy, long thought to be a neurological disorder, is actually a problem with the pancreas.

If John Hughlings Jackson were alive to today, he would no doubt be feeling a little sheepish at this exciting news.

Too Much Too Young?

The New York Times has published part 3 in its series on child mental health with a look at how psychiatric drugs are being prescribed to children, and the evidence on their benefits and side-effects.

We featured the publication of the first two parts in the series on Mind Hacks. These looked at the impact of emotional and behavioural disturbance in children and the difficulties of adequately diagnosing child mental illness.

In contrast, the final part looks at the thorny issue of medicating disturbed children.

The article notes that some children are being prescribed a number of psychiatric drugs – a practice known as polypharmacy – despite limited or non-existent evidence for how effective this might be.

In fact, even the long-term effects of single drugs in children are poorly researched, with most ‘long-term’ studies lasted no more than two years.

The dilemma is that genuine long-term studies that would test for differences in adulthood after drug-treatment as a child could take 10-15 years.

This is a very long-time to wait if you’ve got a seriously mentally ill child on your hands and access to a drug which is known to help in the short-term.

Perhaps the more difficult ethical situations (as with most of mental health) do not involve the most severely distressed or impaired people.

These might be children whose behaviour is considered disruptive, who might be consistently unhappy, or who are considered not to be fulfilling their potential, but are not completely impaired in their day-to-day life.

For example, a medication such as the amphetamine-like drug methylphenidate (Ritalin) might genuinely improve school performance in these cases.

If the drug helps, is this a mental disorder? Either way, if the drug helps, should it be prescribed?

Teachers might have an interest in having medicated (and therefore better behaved) children in their classroom to maximise learning for everyone in the class.

Parents might want their child to make full use of their educational opportunities, even if that means taking a drug.

Child psychiatry is necessarily family and school-oriented, so it would take a brave doctor to refuse to prescribe when both school and parents are united in their opinion, even if they might only be focused on the desired change in the child’s behaviour, and not considering any other impact these drugs might have.

Furthermore, considering that childhood mental disorders can be triggered or made worse by inadequate social and emotional care, some worry that these drugs are being used to pacify children without addressing what might be the root cause of the problem in the family.

As the other articles in the series have done, this article combines both the experiences of families living with these difficulties and dilemmas, and includes comments from researchers and clinicians dealing with the problems from a professional standpoint.

Link to article ‘Proof Is Scant on Psychiatric Drug Mix for Young’.

Teaching computers to climb the tower of babel

Subtleties are important in language. I learnt this by using the phrase ‘tengo 26 anos’ in Spanish where I should have used ‘tengo 26 a√±os’. As I discovered, the difference is slight but surprisingly meaningful.

While a computer is fooled by my error, a Spanish speaker would likely find it hilarious, but would get my intended meaning, because, in language, context is everything.

One of the most difficult things for computer translation is that context includes not only the other words in a sentence, but the state of the world, shared cultural assumptions, and even the mental state of each person in the conversation.

If this seems like an impossible problem to solve, Wired has an article on companies trying to create better translators, and they’ve managed it with some significant success.

They’ve achieved their success by ‘doing a Google‘ and taking advantage of the fact that while it’s impossible to get a computer to understand human concepts, it is possible to use the massive amount of text on the internet as a database of human assumptions.

The computer translator generates as many translations as it can, and then matches each one to the ‘database’ of text to see which one is most like real human language. The one that matches is most likely to be the best translation.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the general idea.

For the first time in history, the internet has provided a massive amount of self-generating human data that can be easily accessed by our tools of analysis.

Rather than expecting computers to be individually intelligent, it might be more fruitful to get them to process the structure of behaviour, and get meaning from the real humans.

Link to Wired article ‘Me Translate Pretty One Day’.

Metaphors of mind in the history of the novel

The Psychologist has just made an article available online that examines the history of how novelists have used metaphors to describe the human mind. The article also tackles how this has reflected our understanding of the mind itself.

Mind-metaphors have always reflected dominant scientific ideas, and psychologists and cognitive scientists have always used metaphors in building their theories (Leary, 1990). During the heyday of behaviourism, when theorising about internal states was more-or-less taboo, the incidence of metaphors of mind in published psychological research dropped away accordingly (Gentner & Grudin, 1985). Metaphors of mind, both literary and scientific, can act as ‘guide fossils’ in reflecting the prevailing scientific orthodoxies of the eras in which they are found (Draaisma, 2000). What if these metaphors turn out to be wrong? What if the mind doesn’t work that way?

A book that has looked at metaphors for psychology in more detail is Metaphors of Memory by dutch psychologist Prof Douwe Draaisma.

He notes that psychological theories have often been inspired by technology, so we understood the mind as being a system of pneumatic and hydraulic forces in the 1800s, while we now use metaphors of information processing as computers have become the dominant technology.

It’s interesting to think that our understanding of ourselves might be limited by our ability to build technology.

It’s also interesting to wonder whether the move to incorporate more biological function into technology will mean we are less bound by restrictive metaphors in future cognitive science.

In The Psychologist article, Charles Fernyhough argues that fiction may be a rich source of metaphors, and work in developing more poetic approaches to understanding the mind may make important contributions to theory building in psychology.

Link to article ‘Metaphors of Mind’.