Searching for emotional truth

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PsyBlog has posted the first of a new series entitled ‘Emotional Truth: The Search Starts Here’ that will examine how much control we have over emotions and how they link to our thoughts and experiences.

Many people would say their emotions only come when they will and not when they want. So how do thoughts and emotions interact in everyday life and in therapeutic processes like cognitive behavioural therapy? Do we really have any control over our emotions or are they things that just happen to us?

The first part looks at the work of the philosopher Robert Solomon who attempts to unpick ‘common sense’ psychology to show that our everyday understanding of emotions poorly describes how they affect our thoughts and behaviour.

Further parts in the series will analyse some of the latest findings from emotion science that are helping us make sense of our chaotic feelings.

Link to Part 1 of ‘Emotional Truth: The Search Starts Here’ from PsyBlog.

Dracula’s debt to Victorian neurology

While searching for more information on Bram Stoker’s supposed death by syphilis in the medical literature (I found nothing), I did come across this summary of a fascinating paper about the influence of late-Victorian neurology on Dracula.

Cerebral automatism, the brain, and the soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. 2006 Jun;15(2):131-52.

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries. Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was “determined” through the reflex action of the body and brain – a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker’s vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.

The paper is by English Professor Anne Stiles and frustratingly, the full-text isn’t freely available online, although the full reference is listed on PubMed for those with access to the journal.

If anyone does ‘find’ a freely-accessible copy online, please let me know and I’ll be happy to link to it.

However, Stiles was a guest on ABC Radio’s All in the Mind last year discussing the role of neurology in Victoria horror novels, the transcript of which is still available.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

Five minutes with Nick Yee

Nick Yee is researching the psychology of social interaction in online worlds, and finding some surprising results.

At first sight, multi-player worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft may seem like relatively crude or whimsical simulations of real-life social situations.

But intriguingly, Yee has discovered that ‘personal space’ and other aspects of non-verbal communication are just as important, and that offline romances can blossom in online game worlds.

While these worlds are becoming the centre of new economies, social groups and leisure activities, Yee hopes to understand how the human mind adapts to communication via virtual reality.

He’s also kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about his work and latest discoveries.

Continue reading “Five minutes with Nick Yee”

Brain shake

Alright, hold tight
I want to ball tonight
On my fender, no space defender
I enjoy it on the floor, I get it tight
Toe to toe with a black widow
Fee Fia Foo smell the blood of rock ‘n’ roll
All night drive on the rockin’ suicide
My feet are jumping, she’s a joy to ride
Joy to ride, a joy to ride
She’s an all night drive on the rockin’ suicide

And it’s a brain shake, brain shake, brain shake
All I can take
Brain shake, brain shake, brain shake

Rock group AC/DC give a timely warning about the dangers of diffuse axonal injury when going “toe to toe with a black widow” in their 1983 song Brain Shake.

As the song is presumably a reference to having sex, you’d be having to be doing something really quite frightening to risk diffuse axonal injury, which is a tear in the brain’s white matter that usually occurs after the brain is shaken by a serious fall or car crash.

Perhaps Brian Johnson and his bandmates might consider using a future song to warn about the more realistic dangers of stroke during sex in those with patent foramen ovale, a congenital heart defect?

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:

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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?’.