Mind Hacks

Synesthete.org is a website that has a series of online tests where you can test yourself for synaesthesia – the condition where senses are crossed so, for example, you might be able to taste shapes or see colours associated with specific numbers.

The site is run by the Eagleman Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine who study links between perception and action, as well as the curious world of synaesthesia.

If you’re a researcher, you can also use the site to test and collect results on your own participants, and the same tests are also available as downloadable software for the Matlab package.

It’s now known that synaesthesia is partly inherited, so if you find that you or one of your family members seems to have the condition, others in the family may also have similar abilities.

Link to synesthete.org.

As an update to a previous post on John E. Fryer’s dramatic role in getting homosexuality de-listed as a mental illness in 1973, thanks to the reader who emailed to say that the radio programme This American Life has a special on the fascinating story of the people behind the wider campaign.

The programme also charts the personal family story of Alix Spiegel, the producer of the This American Life series, whose grandfather was John Spiegel, president of the American Psychiatric Association when homosexuality was finally removed from the diagnostic manual.

She tells how the issue had a significant impact on psychiatry and society, but also on her family (you’ll have to listen to find out why).

The story recounts one curious event when psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, then head of the diagnostic committee, visited a clandestine gay psychiatrists’ party to meet gay psychiatrists for himself, and was surprised to see many of the psychiatric establishment there.

Although it will cost you 99 cents to download the mp3 of the programme, and audio can be streamed for free from the webpage.

Link to page for ’81 words’ programme with streamed audio (speaker icon).

The British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, run by our own very own Christian Jarrett, seems to have undergone a bit of a change and is now posting in daily bite-sized chunks rather than in two week mega-servings.

A couple of things I picked up from it recently include video from the recently sold-out Royal Society conference ‘Mental Processes in the Human Brain’ and a piece on the seeming impossibility of successfully predicting which soldiers might have mental health problems once they get deployed.

There’s also a wonderful piece on the psychology of why young children think they’re invisible when they close their eyes!

There’s much more where that came from, and now it’s delivered daily.

Link to rejigged BPS Research Digest.

The plot line of this upcoming movie sounds very odd (and it must be said, very original):

“Heartbroken by a break-up with his girlfriend Desiree, twentysomething Zia (Almost Famous’ Patrick Fugit) kills himself – only to wake up in the afterlife: a purgatory populated exclusively by other suicides, where the jukeboxes only play Joy Division and Nirvana, all the colours seem desaturated, and life is more or less the same as back in the real world – ‘just a little worse’. Learning that his beloved ex has also taken her life, he hooks up with a Russian misfit (whose final moments, seen in flashback, provide one of the film’s funniest scenes), and a moody Goth hitchhiker (Shannyn Sossamon), and sets off in a battered station wagon to find her; the resulting road-trip – including a scene-stealing cameo by Tom Waits – forms the basis of this ruefully funny road movie.”

It’s got excellent reviews so far, so I’ll be interested to see how it manages to deal with such a sensitive issue.

Link to official site.
Link to IMDB entry.

New Scientist turns 50 today, and to celebrate, they’ve reprinted some classic news stories from their archives and have predictions from a clutch of contemporary scientists.

The only neuroscience-related story from the archive is the discovery of endorphins, natural pain-killing opioids in the brain, from way back in ’76.

Cognitive scientists make more of a showing in the section on predictions about the future with Rodney Brooks, Steven Pinker, Elizabeth Loftus, Igor Aleksander, Geoffry Miller, Terry Sejnowski, Eric Horvitz, Frans de Waal and Michael Gazzaniga all making their pitches.

Some of the feature articles, only available to paying subscribers, also tackle mind and brain issues, as the magazine attempts to describe some of the biggest problems still facing science.

Articles on ‘What is consciousness?’, ‘What is reality?’, ‘What comes after Homo sapiens?’ and ‘Do we have free will?’ all cover areas of interest to psychology and neuroscience enthusiasts.

Link to NewSci 50th anniversary edition details.

The New York Times has published the first two parts of an ongoing series on the experience and difficulties of diagnosing mental illness in children.

The area of child mental illness is controversial, largely because diagnosis is so difficult.

Diagnosing adults is tricky at the best of times, but mental disorder seems to appear differently in children and is often classified using specific diagnoses.

Some disorders, such as conduct disorder or childhood autism, can only be diagnosed in children, while others, such as psychotic disorders, could technically be diagnosed but are incredibly rare in pre-adolescents.

Some diagnoses are subject to significant cultural differences. For example, some American psychiatrists are diagnosing children with bipolar disorder as young as 6-years-old, while most British psychiatrists tend to be quite unhappy with this, and in practice, rarely diagnose anyone under 18 with the condition.

At the moment, awareness of ‘Juvenile Bipolar Disoder’, as it has been christened, is being heavily promoted in America.

For example, the Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation website even lets you ‘screen’ your own child with an online questionnaire to see if they have the condition.

Cynics may note that the organisation is sponsored by, among others, Novartis Pharmaceuticals and make accusations of disease mongering, while supporters would argue that it is increasing awareness of an under-recognised disorder and hope that it will lead to better treatment for children in distress

One of the concerns of these diagnoses, is that they typically lead to substantial drug treatment, the long-term effects of which are not well understood or researched.

The first NYT article explores the experience of one family who had a daughter who developed behavioural problems and started experiencing psychotic symptoms at the age of 7, a very uncommon occurrence.

The second article looks at the process of diagnosis itself, and what difficulties psychiatrists face when trying to separate bizarre but normal childhood fantasy from troubling thoughts and feelings.

This is an especially difficult task in children who do not necessarily have the language or mental abilities to fully communicate their own experiences.

Both articles have video and a photo essay to accompany them. Presumably, more articles in the series will be forthcoming.

Link to NYT article ‘Living With Love, Chaos and Haley’.
Link to NYT article ‘What‚Äôs Wrong With a Child? Psychiatrists Often Disagree’.