Mind Hacks

It seems the story about the sleeping-pill zolpidem potentially helping people in a persistent vegetative state has turned up again, virtually unchanged from when it first broke in May.

The Telegraph reports that Professor Robert Winston has criticised the recent British Association Festival of Science for allowing an ‘unbalanced’ discussion of parapsychology as “I know of no serious properly done studies which make me feel that this is anything other than nonsense.”

This is a little ironic, as Winston recently had adverts for ‘clever milk’ pulled from newspapers by the advertising standards authority for being misleading.

In the adverts, he claimed that a brand of Omega-3 fortified milk boosted children’s intelligence. The authority did not find evidence to support this claim.

Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column in The Guardian summarises the evidence as follows:

Contrary to what the pill-peddlers would tell you, the evidence for omega 3 pills being beneficial in children is really rather thin: only a handful of small trials have been published in proper journals, and at last count 3 were positive, 2 were negative, and none were in mainstream children.

The conclusion of these studies is about as strong as that drawn from a recent review in Psychological Bulletin on psychokinesis.

The review concluded by saying that the evidence was weakly positive in support of this ‘psi-ability’, but they couldn’t be sure that the effect wasn’t due to a reporting bias.

In contrast to the Omega-3 studies, however, the authors of the review found that the psychokinesis studies were generally of a high standard.

One of the ironies of this debate is that parapsychology studies are often some of most rigorously conducted in science, largely to avoid accusations of ‘pseudoscience’.

The fact that they tend to find a weak effect at best (and most commonly no effect) doesn’t make them bad science.

Furthermore, as pointed out by a 2004 New Scientist article, (pdf) the studies are typically better conducted and can produce greater supporting evidence than the often notoriously-biased pharmaceutical drug trial reports.

To quote psychologist William James “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices”.

Link to Telegraph article “Festival attacked over paranormal ‘nonsense'”.
Link to Times article “‘Misleading’ Winston milk ads pulled”.
pdf of New Scientist article ‘Opposites Detract’.

The 6th edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon is now available on Retrospectacle.

A curious news report from what sounds like a difficult court case:

A man has been acquitted of raping a woman – because she had at least 14 personalities.

In a bizarre case, a jury was told that the 40-year-old man was accused of sexually assaulting the woman 11 times in her home in 2004 while some of her alter egos looked on and at times intervened.

During the District Court trial that finished last Tuesday, the court was told three of the 33-year-old woman’s personalities were present at one of the alleged incidents.

The complainant said two identities had been at other incidents.

Top WA criminal lawyer Judith Fordham, who watched the case, said it was the strangest she had seen.

“Although there have been many cases in our courts where the accused has a mental illness, and some where victims or alleged victims suffer from mental illness, in 20 years as a lawyer I have never seen anything quite like this,” she said.

Multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, is a controversial diagnosis that generally causes confusion whenever it appears in a legal case.

In one famous case, Kenneth Bianchi (the ‘Hillside Strangler’) claimed that he could not be held responsible for a series of murders as another ‘evil’ personality committed the crimes.

He was suspected to be faking and was caught out when a psychologist deliberately fed him the false information that MPD “always” involved more than two personalities.

Another personality ‘appeared’ shortly after and Bianchi was convicted of the murders.

Link to news report from News.com.au (via anomalist).
Link to BBC info on the Bianchi case.

There’s a curious article from The Guardian on the work of two researchers who are investigating the link between beauty and intelligence, and who argue that a genuine link exists.

Are beautiful people more intelligent than the rest of us? Satoshi Kanazawa and Jody Kovar think so. In a 17-page study called Why Beautiful People Are More Intelligent, they explain bluntly: “Individuals perceive physically attractive others to be more intelligent than physically unattractive others. While most researchers dismiss this perception as a ‘bias’ or ‘stereotype’, we contend that individuals have this perception because beautiful people indeed are more intelligent.”

The full paper is available online as a pdf and there’s a previous write-up from the Washington Post.

It seems the research is largely on the link between beauty and intelligence in females, however.

Link to Guardian article ‘Pretty smart’.
Link to Washington Post article.
pdf of research article.

A team led by neuropsychologist Dr Adrian Owen has reported on a patient who supposedly fulfilled all the criteria for a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state (PVS) but was found to have conscious awareness.

This seems a little confusing to me, as PVS is usually defined as where ‘higher’ cognitive abilities, such as awareness, are not present.

Unfortunately, I can’t read the article in full as I’m still away from home, but I suspect the diagnosis is usually based on observations of external signs of awareness, whereas Owen’s group used fMRI (a type of ‘brain scanning’) to look for changes in brain activation that would not necessarilly result in observable behaviour.

There’s a good write-up over at the BBC site with accompanying video, and for those with access to the full-text of the journal Science the original paper is available online.

This is similar to a recent study (covered previously on Mind Hacks) where researchers found evidence for similar sorts of ‘higher’ cognitive function in two patients in a ‘minimally conscious state‘.

It is likely, however, that all of these patients have suffered some problems with mental function, owing to extensive brain injury.

As psychology and neuroscience are able to measure brain function in more direct ways, rather than solely through observable behaviour, these sorts of coma-like states are likely to be found to be much more complex than previously thought.

However, neither of these conditions should be confused with ‘locked-in syndrome‘, where the cortex of the brain is largely undamaged, but selective damage to the brain stem means that the person cannot move his or her body and is often totally paralysed, despite being mentally intact.

One of the most powerful books I have ever read is the The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, written by the ex-editor of Elle magazine, who suffered a stroke and became ‘locked in’.

He wrote the book by indicating single letters with his only form of movement – an eye blink. The book is a transcendent description of his experience both before and after the onset of his condition.

Bauby died two days after the book was published but left the world with one of its most beautiful and unique literary works.

Link to BBC News story.
Link to abstract from Science.

Thanks very much to Robbie Ben for alerting us to the fact that there´s a full article on eye gaze and cognition by Dr Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon freely available online as a pdf file.

The article was published in The Psychologist in 2004 and discusses much of the background behind Doherty-Sneddon´s work which has led to the research mentioned in the previous post.

pdf of article ‘Don’t look now, I’m trying to think’.

There’s an interesting news report on the Nature website suggesting that gazing into the middle distance improves concentration.

Researchers at the University of Stirling in Scotland took a group of 25 five-year-olds and trained them to look away when they were being asked a question. The effect was a significant increase in correct answers to mental arithmetic questions, says Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon, who led the research. She declined to give details as the work is in press with the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

It strikes me as a bit strange that someone would decline to give details because the paper is ‘in press’.

When a paper is ‘in press’ it means that it has been reviewed by independent scientists and declared to be worthy of publication.

It is standard practice for researchers give out ‘pre-prints’ of the research papers to anyone who asks at this stage and it is considered a little obstructive to refuse.

Despite this strangeness, it seems like an interesting study and I’ll look forward to reading it when it is finally published.

Link to news report from Nature.

Many thanks to Sevillian computational neuroscientists Marcos and Jorge who kindly talked me through their information processing model of the neocortex yesterday.

There will be more information on their exciting project appearing here shortly.