Trepanation and syphilis

I went to the exhibition I posted about yesterday on visual cognition in painting and surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons and was a bit under-whelmed to be honest.

It was interesting, but was really just some colourful information boards about the study and research project.

However, the Hunterian Museum is always excellent, and I happened across this exhibit of a skull with three trepanation holes in it, and evidence of syphilitic caries (cavities in the skull caused by infection).

There’s no other information about it, except it is pre-1831.

It isn’t known whether the hole-drilling operation was an attempt to ‘treat’ the infection by syphilis, but it is likely, owing to the fact that syphilis often leads to neurosyphilis.

Neurosyphilis is known to cause a number of neurological and psychiatric consequences – psychosis being the most well-known.

Some say that Dracula author Bram Stoker, was suffering from neurosyphilis when he wrote his final, and frankly weird, last novel The Lair of the White Worm.

The Hunterian Museum has an online catalogue, called SurgiCat that allows you to search the museum records and indexes.

A search for ‘trephining’ (an alternative name for trepanation) brings up a number of surgical kits used for the purpose and various bits of skull and brain-covering that show evidence of hole-drilling.

Visual cognition in painting and surgery

The Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum in London has a fascinating exhibition on at the moment entitled How do you look? that investigates the role of visual cognition in painting and surgery.

The exhibition has been conceived and led by Dr John Tchalenko from Camberwell College of Arts, who has a long-standing interest in the cognitive neuroscience of painting-relevant skills.

Also involved is artist Humphrey Ocean, who has previously been brain-scanned by Tchalenko as part of a study into novice vs expert artistic skills.

How Do You Look? examines how a painter and a surgeon use their eyes in their work, how they coordinate their eye and hand movements and how these translate into actions and creative processes. The exhibition explores the similarities and differences in their work and makes comparisons with how we all use our eyes in everyday tasks and when viewing the world around us.

Dr John Tchalenko elaborates, ‘The eye captures and the brain processes the information needed at a particular instant to fulfil the task in hand. It is how the visual system works. In the scientific jargon it’s known as “eye ‚Äì hand coordination”‘. ‘The brain does not know whether it is dealing with art, surgery or everyday life. How you look depends on what the action is, not who you are.’

There’s more at the dedicated website including dates for when the exhibition is touring the UK.

It remains at the Hunterian Museum until 22nd December 2006.

Link to info from Royal College of Surgeons.
Link to ‘How do you look?’ website.

Student Blogging Scholarship

Scholarships-ar-us.org are offering $5000 in fee-money as part of their ‘Student Blogging Scholarship’. You can vote for your favourite student blogger from among the top ten finalists here.

There is only one neuroscientist in the final 10: Shelley Batts, a 3rd-year Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, who blogs at Retrospectacle. Shelley would love to have your vote, and the money would help put her through school, promote blogging and promote neuroscience – all good things in my book!

Vote for Shelley here. Voting ends midnight Nov 5th.

Stalking the wiley user

ABC Radio’s In Conversation has just broadcast a discussion on our relationship with technology with Prof Mike Michael, a psychologist and sociologist who researches how we interact with new devices and scientific developments.

Michael discusses how psychologists and anthropologists are increasingly being employed to understand how technology is used by people in day-to-day life, which can sometimes be quite different from the way the manufacturers originally intended.

…if one thinks of the microwave; when that was initially marketed it was as a brown or black, it was basically aimed at men and it failed dismally. And then it was converted to a white good and aimed at women, and that obviously mapped on to all sorts of gender divisions of labour within the kitchen and so on, and it’s a success. …

Another example is the telephone. The telephone initially was thought to be a business tool for men and it had some success, but it was when women took it over as a social tool for maintaining social contacts with friends and family that it really took off.

Michael argues that as well as the practical uses of technology, these items can also take on social uses, can be used to create or weaken immediate social environments, or to broadcast messages about a person’s identity to others.

The programme covers technologies as diverse as the mobile phone to gene therapy and xenotransplantation.

Link to audio and transcript of In Conversation.

2006-11-03 Spike activity

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

spike.jpg

Erotica has a measurable psychological effect even we can’t consciously detect it, reports Scientific American. Ironically, the study is published in a journal called PNAS.

Modern gimmick or sensible application of attachment theory? Infant psychotherapy is discussed by the Post Gazette.

A study of Asian elders finds that curcumin, an ingredient in curry, helps keep the brain healthy, reports The Times.

Gene ‘flaw’ increases autism risk, reports BBC News.

This month’s PLoS Medicine is a special issue on social medicine.

Researchers are working on a promising blood test for Alzheimer’s disease, reports BBC News.

Alpha Psy has a wonderful guide to sex differences in cognition.

The headline simply repeats a common feature of depression as if it were news but the study suggests a reason why people with depression can have a consistent change in mood during the day (known as diurnal variation).

An intriguing study on the the cognitive psychology of face recognition is tackled by Cognitive Daily.

Concise article from Blog Around the Clock on how babies develop sleep patterns.

The New York Times reviews Marc Hauser’s book that argues we have a ‘moral grammar’. Commentary on the controversial claims here and here.

Having a positive ethnic identity boosts the happiness of teens, reports Medical News.

Keeping trauma victims awake may prevent PTSD

distraught_white_bg.jpgAn article in October’s Biological Psychiatry reports that immediate sleep maintains emotional memories and suggests an intriguing hypothesis – that post-traumatic stress disorder could be prevented by stopping people from sleeping immediately after a traumatic event.

A research team, led by psychologist Ullrich Wagner, asked tired participants to learn neutral texts (such as a piece about dressmaking) or emotional texts (such as a piece about child murder).

Some of the participants slept immediately, others were kept awake for three hours after learning.

Four years later, the participants were tested for how well they had remembered the texts.

Those who had slept immediately after learning had better memory than those who hadn’t, but only for the emotional topics.

This suggests that sleep helps consolidate memory most effectively for emotional material.

The researchers argue that these results suggest a simple way of dampening the impact of intense memories that form one of the main features of post-traumatic distress disorder: intrusive vivid memories of the event.

“From a clinical perspective, our results suggest the use of sleep deprivation in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events as a possible therapeutic measure to prevent a long-term engravement of these events in memory, thereby at least partly counteracting the development of PTSD as a disease thought to reflect overconsolidated emotional memories.”

Although not widely known, sleep deprivation is not a new treatment for psychiatric disorders.

It is known that missing a night’s sleep can significantly improve mood, even in people with severe depression.

Unfortunately, the improvement is often lost when people catch up on their sleep and it is still not clear why these effects occur.

Link to abstract of ‘Brief sleep after learning keeps emotional memories alive for years’.
Link to abstract of ‘Therapeutic use of sleep deprivation in depression’.

Viva Las Vegans

Just found this funny misprint in an article from the American Psychological Association’s magazine Monitor on Psychology while looking for articles on sleep psychology:

Sleep psychologist Paul Saskin helps Las Vegans sleep more soundly, day and night.

…perfectly timed for World Vegan Day.

UPDATE: I’ve been told people from Las Vegas are really called Las Vegans. Every day is a school day isn’t it?

Psychology of two-in-a-bed

couple_in_bed.jpgThere’s a wonderful article in The New York Times about the psychology and sociology of bed sharing.

This is one of the most common of human activities, and like many everyday behaviours, has a significant impact on our lives and yet has been largely ignored by researchers.

In more recent research — on grief — Dr. Rosenblatt interviewed couples whose children had died.

“They quite often would tell me that they dealt with their grief by holding each other and talking together in bed at night,” he said. “It seemed that I kept being reminded of how sharing a bed impacts our lives and sense of well-being.”

And yet, no one had really studied it, perhaps because sharing a bed is so mundane, Dr. Rosenblatt said. So he wrote Two in a Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing.

The article makes the point that sleep psychology, that looks at mind and brain factors in sleep and drowsiness, largely considers sleep to be a solitary activity, yet the majority is sleeping is a social act.

The first chapter of Rosenblatt’s book is freely available online as a pdf file.

Link to article ‘People Who Share a Bed, and the Things They Say About It’.
pdf of first chapter of Two in a Bed.

Who was the Wolf Man?

wolf_dream.jpgABC Radio’s The Philosopher’s Zone has an edition on one of Freud’s most famous cases, named ‘The Wolf Man’, because the patient had a dream about a tree full of white wolves outside his bedroom window, waiting to eat him.

That’s a picture of the dream on the right (click for larger version) painted by the patient himself, whose real name was Sergei Pankejeff.

Pankejeff was a member of the Russian upper-classes whose sister and father had committed suicide and personally suffered from a debilitating depression.

Freud analysed Pankejeff and interpreted his current emotional turmoil as being due to a disruption in his early sexual development.

His ‘wolf dream’ was thought to be a masked expression of his disturbance at accidentally seeing his parents have sex when he was a child. Freud thought the wolves were an expression of seeing this ‘primal’ act.

This edition of The Philosopher’s Zone looks at the importance of the ‘Wolf Man’ for the development of psychoanalysis, but also looks at wider issues of how evidence is used in building theories of the mind.

Freud is often criticised for the validity of his theories, and the programme discusses whether he was justified in drawing these conclusions when there was little other evidence on the function of the mind to work with.

Link to audio and transcript of ‘Who was the Wolf Man?’.

Fading faces

face_blur.jpgWired Magazine has an article on a curious condition known as prosopagnosia where affected individuals cannot recognise people by their faces, despite being able to recognise and distinguish everyday objects with little trouble.

Until recently, it was thought that the condition only arose after brain injury – usually because of damage to an area of the brain known as the fusiform gyrus. This area is known to be heavily involved in face recognition.

It has more recently been reported as an inherited form, suggesting that some people are simply born with particularly bad face recognition skills.

The article looks at the work of neuropsychologist Dr Bradley Duchaine who is investigating the psychology and neuroscience of face recognition impairment, and discusses the experience of several people who have the condition.

One of the people is Bill Choisser, who created ‘Face Blind!‘, one of the first and longest-running prosopagnosia websites on the net.

A particularly striking feature of his site is a self-published book which is an in-depth discussion of the condition and its effects.

Link to Wired article ‘Face Blind’.
Link to Bradley Duchaine’s page with copies of his scientific papers.
Link to Bill Choisser’s website on prosopagnosia.

How to be funny

laugh_smile.jpgThere’s an interesting (and actually quite funny) article from The Telegraph on the psychology of humour, written by the comedians Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves.

Rather than examining the research on the psychology of humour, it looks at how comedians view jokes and joke telling, relating it both to professional comedy and informal social jokes among friends.

For those wanting a view from the science of humour, however, there’s more on the humour research page.

Link to ‘How to be Funny’ from The Telegraph (via 3Quarks).
Link to Humour Research Page.

Synapse 10 arrives

brain mould_image.jpgIssue 10 of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival The Synapse has just arrived on Neurocritic.

This edition has a distinct Halloween theme with an article on the neuroscience of fear and disgust, and instructions on how to make a realistic edible brain (pictured on the right).

Apart from the spookier articles, there’s also a collection of recent writing on everything from obsessive-compulsive disorder in Macbeth, to the role of peptides in neural transport.

Link to Issue 10 of The Synapse.

Why so many US psychiatric casualties in Iraq?

HM3_2545_iraq_war_001.jpgTwo studies published this year have highlighted a stark difference in the level of psychiatric casualties between British and American troops involved in the Iraq war.

A study in the Lancet reported that only four percent of British troops in Iraq reach criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a trauma related mental illness.

In contrast, approximately ten to twenty percent of US troops are diagnosable with the condition, according to studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In an editorial for JAMA, psychiatrists Matthew Hotopf and Simon Wessely suggest a number of reasons for why this might be the case.

The first is that US troops may be involved in more dangerous combat duty and are therefore more likely to be traumatised.

However, they suggest other factors are also likely to be important.

US tours of duty are typically for 1 year, whereas UK tours are for 6 months. This means any combat-duty-related psychological stresses are likely to be extended in US personnel.

Further factors relate to the differences in the populations of the US and UK forces:

…the groups described in the US studies were demographically different from those described here. The US forces deployed to Iraq in both studies were younger, of lower rank, and contained more reservists than our UK sample. While less than 10% of the US sample had previous experience of deployment, more than two-thirds of the UK service personnel from both cohorts had been on previous deployments in a range of settings, including both war-fighting and peacekeeping duties. They therefore had much more experience of the stresses of military deployments, and might have been more resilient to these stresses.

In other words, US forces in Iraq are more likely to be made up of younger, non-professional soldiers, on longer tours of duty, with less combat experience, in more dangerous areas, when compared to their their UK counterparts – potentially making them more vulnerable to mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Link to abstract of Lancet study on mental health of UK troops in Iraq.
Link to JAMA study on mental health of US troops in Iraq.
Link to NEJM study on mental health of US troops in Iraq.
Link to US National Center for PTSD Iraq War information page.