The latest edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival The Synapse has arrive online, hosted by the fantastic Developing Intelligence.
This edition contains links to articles on everything from mental illness in Bollywood to million neuron 3D animations. Enjoy!
Link to Issue 11 of The Synapse.
Haynes, the maker of the well-known manuals on car mechanics, have released a Haynes Brain Manual (ISBN 1844253716) that gives tips and advice on keeping your mind and brain running smoothly.
Covering everything from exercise and nutrition for optimal brain function, to dealing with stress, to getting help with mental or neurological health problems, the manual seems to be fun and informative guide to possible solutions and resources available.
It not only gives personal advice but also includes a guide to dealing with professional services and tracking down the right sort of help when you need it.
It’s mainly targeted at men, and probably fills a gap in the market which is often missed by most blokes’ magazines.
The website has a selection of pages from the book available as PDF files if you want to have a look inside.
Link to Haynes Brain Manual page.
According to the Spiritual Science Research Foundation, 96% of addictions are “primarily caused due to possession by either ghosts or our departed ancestors” with only 4% being due to physical and psychological factors. Well, that’s that sorted then.
The full ‘research’ report is available online, and I have to say, the diagrams alone are worth the effort.
America’s National Library of Medicine have put scans of beautiful old medical texts online including Jospeh Vimont’s wonderfully illustrated 1832 anatomy book entitled Trait√© de phr√©nologie humaine et compar√©e that compares the skull and brain of humans and animals.
Despite the French title, it’s annotated in both English and French and contains some fantastic illustrations of both normal and abnormal neuroanatomy.
Apparently, it was an attempt to investigate the links between brain structure and the ‘science’ of phrenology which claimed that bumps on the head indicated personality because they suggested how the brain was developing underneath.
Although phrenology has been discounted as rubbish, it is credited with sparking some of the first ideas on whether specific brain areas could be involved in specific mental abilities, an idea that is now central to modern cognitive neuroscience.
People who take this idea too far, by suggesting that there is a ‘brain centre’ for some particular complex behaviour are often accused of being ‘modern day phrenologists’ (usually with an accompanying look of disdain or a loud tut).
Unfortunately, the media loves stories that go something like “‘Dream centre’ of the brain found” (a real headline) which encourages reporters to distort the usually ambiguous findings of research studies, and scientists to over-simplify their conclusions.
In contrast, Vimont’s book is a form of innocent and sincere phrenology and, perhaps, should be enjoyed as such.
Link to Traité de phrénologie humaine et comparée (via BB).
There’s a news story and video clip on the BBC News website about a reporter’s experience of being inside the new 7-tesla fMRI scanner at Nottingham University.
Tesla is a measure of magnetic field strength and the greater the field strength of an fMRI scanner, the more detailed images it is likely to produce.
Most scanners are 1.5-tesla, or more recently, 3-tesla, with only a few 7-tesla machines in existence.
You’ll occasionally hear scientists who work with fMRI-scanners proudly announce the field strength as if it were a measure of, well… I’m sure you can guess.
The report is interesting both for the 1970s footage of Nobel Prize winning MRI inventor Peter Mansfield inside the first ever MRI machine, and for the completely bizarre ‘MRI picture frame’ example used half way through the clip.
Link to BBC News story and video clip link.
Link to info page on Nottingham Uni’s 7-tesla scanner.
I just read a news item in Psychiatric News on the first John E. Fryer M.D. Award, named after the man who appeared in disguise as Dr H. Anonymous at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association conference to declare he was a gay psychiatrist at a time when homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness.
This has been cited as a key factor in getting homosexuality de-listed from the diagnostic manual the following year, and was a landmark event both in the history of psychiatry and gay rights.
Consequently, I was surprised to find that there was nothing about John Fryer on Wikipedia, despite having been honoured by having an award named after him and obituaries in the leading medical journals when he passed away in 2003.
So, I’ve put together a Wikipedia page for John E. Fryer with some of the fascinating story and details, but this is where I need your help.
Although I know a little about the history of psychiatry, I’m afraid I don’t know a great deal about gay culture or history, so if you do, please expand the article and mesh it in with the other relevant articles on Wikipedia.
Also, if anyone knows of any open-licensed pictures of Dr Fryer or Dr Anonymous to include in the article, or can get permission to use any pictures, please do so.
Finally, there are more details in the information in the ‘external links’ section, so if you have a few minutes to rewrite it in your own words to add to the article, this would also be very useful (and any factual corrections or fixes to my dodgy prose are also welcome!).
Link to Wikipedia page for Dr John E. Fryer.
Link to text of Dr H. Anonymous’ 1972 speech.
This month’s Scientific American has a cover story on why differences in the ‘mirror neuron‘ system may explain the social difficulties in autism – and an extended preview is available online.
Mirror neurons are cells in the brain that are active both when a person is performing an action, or when they see someone else perform an action, and have been hypothesised to be involved in perceiving and comprehending others’ actions.
The preview is written by neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran and Lindsay Oberman and introduces an extended article (not freely available online) that argues that people with autism may develop with a dysfunctional mirror neuron system, making them less able to make sense of social interactions.
This basic difficulty could then lead to the common autistic features such as abnormalities of language development, non-verbal communication, emotion recognition and understanding others’ intentions, which all rely on social interaction to develop fully.
‘Mirror neurons’ were first discovered in monkeys by Giacomo Rizzolatti, author of the extended article. However, the mirror neuron system is poorly understood in humans, despite some interesting findings in the research literature.
Ramachandran is currently one of the most enthusiastic ‘mirror neuron’ evangelists, going as far as saying “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology”.
One of the difficulties with this research, is that when compared on a task that involves understanding others’ actions in some way, people with autism tend to perform worse than a non-autistic comparison group.
This makes it difficult to say whether differences in performing the task are really due to differences in the mirror system, or whether it’s a more general problem, such as learning or perception difficulties.
Nevertheless, one recent study has provided some of the best evidence that mirror system differences may genuinely be present.
A team led by neuroscientist Dr Mirella Dapretto asked children with autism who had normal IQ scores to observe and imitate emotional expressions while in an fMRI brain-scanner.
They were compared to non-autistic children and the researchers found that both groups of children performed the task equally well.
Crucially, the children with autism did not show brain activity in an area of the frontal lobe called the pars opercularis – part of the ‘mirror neuron’ system.
This provides strong evidence of differences in the mirror neuron system in autism, although why this difference occurs is still a matter of debate.
For those wanting a good scientific review of the research in this area, a pdf of a recent paper by Vittorio Gallese, one of the co-authors of the extended Scientific American article, is available online.
Link to SciAm preview article ‘Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism’.
Link to abstract of Dapretto study.
Link to coverage of Dapretto study from BBC News.
pdf of Vittorio Gallese’s review on mirror neurons and autism.
“Simply put, sensory adaptation is why you don’t notice your underpants.”
A fantastically straightforward explanation of sensory adaptation in a short article on negative campaigning from The Frontal Cortex.
There’s more on the neuroscience underlying this phenomenon in a 2001 Nature article, online as a pdf file.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Cognitive Daily has a fantastic post on how the brain synchronises sound and vision, even when they’re out of sync (including videos!).
Psychology Today argues that mass-media ‘beauty’ is making people unhappy in Why I hate beauty.
Web pioneers call for a new discipline of ‘web science‘ that combines psychology, economics and law, computer science and engineering.
Developing Intelligence discusses two ways of understanding children who are ‘late talkers’: the nativist and interactionist approaches.
Having a high IQ protects against developing PTSD after major trauma, finds new study.
Computer modelling of shock waves inside the head suggests that brain injury may occur within one millisecond after the head hits a car windshield.
Neurofuture posts on an freely accessible online sci-fi novel on consciousness uploading, AI and zombies (oh my!)
New Scientist reports that industrial chemicals that seep into the environment may increase risk of developmental brain disorders.
Researchers have developed a 3D map of the human body to allow people to better communicate pain.
Children prefer to be friends with children perceived to be lucky, finds new study.
The Neurophilosopher has written an engaging and wonderfully illustrated article on the history of Alois Alzheimer and the disease that bears his name.
Seed Magazine has a fantastic article written by Ogi Ogas, a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience who applied techniques from cognitive psychology to win a cool half-million on the show ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’
Taking advantage of psychological processes such as priming and the structure of associations in memory, Ogas devised strategies to optimise his chances of winning.
The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar “connectionist” neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest….
I used priming on my $16,000 question: “This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?” I did not know the answer. But I did know I had a long conversation with my friend Gena about the cartoons. So I chatted with Meredith about Gena. I tried to remember where we discussed the cartoons and the way Gena flutters his hands. As I pictured how he rolls his eyes to express disdain, Gena’s remark popped into my mind: “What else would you expect from Denmark?”
The article is a fascinating insight into both the psychology of quiz shows, and how lab-based cognitive science relates to more pragmatic real-life situations.
Link to Seed Magazine article (thanks Paul and Candace!).
There’s nothing more interesting than people. The diversity of the human race is the main reason why I find psychology and neuroscience so fascinating.
The following summary of an article from the Journal of Forensic Science is an amazing demonstration of how diverse the human race can be, sadly with tragic consequences in these cases.
Autoerotic fatalities with power hydraulics
Journal of Forensic Science, 1993, Vol 38, Issue 2, p359-64.
We report two cases in which men used the hydraulic shovels on tractors to suspend themselves for masochistic sexual stimulation. One man developed a romantic attachment to a tractor, even giving it a name and writing poetry in its honor. He died accidentally while intentionally asphyxiating himself through suspension by the neck, leaving clues that he enjoyed perceptual distortions during asphyxiation. The other man engaged in sexual bondage and transvestic fetishism, but did not purposely asphyxiate himself. He died when accidentally pinned to the ground under a shovel after intentionally suspending himself by the ankles. We compare these cases with other autoerotic fatalities involving perceptual distortion, cross-dressing, machinery, and postural asphyxiation by chest compression.
The last sentence is typically academic and wonderfully deadpan.
Link to PubMed entry for the article.
The New York Times has covered a recently published brain-scanning study of five individuals who ‘speak in tongues’ – an experience also known as glossolalia – where someone appears to be speaking in an incomprehensible language over which they seem to have no control.
This is usually linked to religious and spiritual worship, particularly for Christians in the charismatic tradition (there’s some footage on YouTube).
A team of researchers, led by Dr Andrew Newberg, used a type of brain-imaging called SPECT to compare blood flow differences in the brain between when participants were singing hymns and when they were speaking in tongues.
The main findings were that when participants were speaking in tongues compared to when they were singing, there was a decrease in activity in the prefrontal cortex, the tip of the left temporal lobe and a deep brain structure called the caudate nucleus (see image on right).
Although brain areas are known to have multiple functions, the prefrontal cortex is known to be involved in cognitive control, while the left temporal pole is associated with naming and the caudate nucleus has been associated with the ability to switch between multiple languages.
The authors suggest that these findings may indicate a loosening of control over language functions in the brain, potentially leading to the production of apparently unstructured language that the participants experience as outside their control.
Notably, there were also relative increases in activity in the left parietal lobe (linked to our sense of body and spatial awareness) and the amygdala – an area known to be heavily involved in emotion.
These findings were a lot harder to explain, however, although the parietal lobe in particular has been linked to meditation, although a previous study found the area showed decreased, not increased activity, as was the case in this instance.
However, this is not the first time that neuroscientists have studied speaking in tongues.
Dr Michael Persinger reported a case in 1984 where he used EEG recordings to look at the electrical activity in the brain of a 20 year-old female who experienced the same phenomenon.
The graph on the left shows EEG recordings taken from the temporal lobes during a period of speaking in tongues that show increased ‘spike events’.
This indicates that, like the more recent Newberg study, changes in temporal lobe function may be an important part of the experience.
Interestingly, people with temporal lobe epilepsy are known to be more likely to have religious or mystical experiences during seizures.
One of my favourite case studies is of 25 year-old female patient with temporal lobe epilepsy who had “seizures characterized by repetition of certain religious statements and a rather compulsive kissing behavior”.
Well, they do say God moves in mysterious ways.
Link to NYT article ‘A Neuroscientific Look at Speaking in Tongues’.
Link to abstract of SPECT study on speaking in tongues.
The Statz Rappers “What would you say if I told you my Cohen d was .30?”:
These guys are so sig…
The Washington Post investigates the neuroscience of lying in a recent article on whether new brain-scanning technologies will be able to separate facts from falsehoods.
This technology is of particular interest to governments interested in whether neuroscience can get more reliable information from suspects, and to companies willing to pay to ‘interrogate’ clients about their truthfulness.
The article mentions a company called No Lie MRI Ltd which claims to use “the first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history”, which surely must violate any number of laws regarding truthfulness in product advertising – considering that the recent research on fMRI lie detection suggests a poor reliability with current methods.
Presumably, they took their own lie detection test and convinced themselves they were telling the truth.
This is not to say that this technology will develop in the future to be more reliable, though.
This prospect has sparked concern about the potential legal (pdf) and ethical issues of this technology and spurred the American Civil Liberties Union to submit a freedom of information request to the US Government earlier this year to see if they are already using fMRI ‘lie detection’ on terrorist suspects.
Some of the hype around brain-scan lie detection harks back to similar claims that were made for the polygraph tests in the past, despite evidence of their poor reliability and high levels of false positives.
Whether fMRI based lie detection turns out to be anything other than a similarly unreliable detection method (but with prettier pictures) remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, one method which does seem to be generating a lot of interest is the Guilty Knowledge Test (pdf), which relies on the fact that the brain tends to produce reliably different automatic responses for items that are recognised compared to items that aren’t.
The idea behind this is that you could show items to suspects that were taken from the ‘crime scene’ and look for the traces of successful recognition measured from the brain.
This technique is now reliable enough that it is starting to be admissible in court. The success of this technique has given researchers hope that successful lie detection may be possible for more than simple recognition situations.
Nevertheless, as every good conman knows, the best lies have a kernel of truth and it’s not clear how well these techniques will detect economies of truth when compared to outright whoppers.
Link to article ‘Brain on Fire’ from The Washington Post.
A new edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just arrived online, as has the latest instalment of British Psychological Society fortnightly psychology update, The Research Digest.
A couple of my favourites include a discussion of the possible conscious influences on the Implicit Association Test or IAT, a psychological test that supposedly tests subconscious associations, and an analysis of a study that suggests that our motivations can influence what we see.
There’s plenty more articles at the two summaries of psychology’s latest, so have a look if you’re eager for more information.
Link to Encephalon issue 10.
Link to lastest BPS Research Digest.
Neurosurgeon and author Katrina Firlik is interviewed in the latest edition of ABC Radio’s All in the Mind about her work and motivations.
Firlik wrote Brain Matters, an engaging book about the difficulties of working knuckle-deep in the brain.
The book spilt the beans on the curiosities of the neurosurgery operating theatre and the preoccupations of people who have dedicated their lives to making running repairs to the nervous system.
Katrina Firlik’s business is brains. Carving into the ‘flesh of the soul’ is her day job. The first woman admitted into one of the most prestigious neurosurgery programs, she’s just penned an insiders account of her world. Part mechanic – part scientist, her intimate encounters of diseased and damaged brains offer a unique, and grisly, lens onto our most mysterious and wondrous organ.
Link to audio and transcript of ‘The Private Life of a Brain Surgeon’.
Mind Hacks 