In Conversation on the psychology of dreams

marinela_sleep.jpgABC Radio National’s In Conversation has an interview with psychologist Susan Gilchrist who has been studying the psychology of dreams and emotion.

As part of her research, she’s been asking people to record and rate and emotional content of their dreams, as well as the emotional impact of the events during the week.

One interesting finding is that the emotional theme of a dream may be more influenced by the average emotional experience during the past week, rather than just the day before.

Gilchrist seems to be taking an empirical approach to an area that was traditionally tackled by Freudian analysis, and was subsequently
ignored as unresearchable.

Link to transcript and audio of Susan Gilchrist interview.

Will someone please muffle Cliff Arnall

Petra Boyton has an article on yet another piece of useless pop psychology from Cliff Arnall – the guy who specialises in making up ‘formulas’ about the happiest day of the year and other such banalities.

These press releases are usually on behalf of a PR company and usually make the headlines, despite being complete nonsense.

Cliff, stop it.

Brain-based ‘lie detection’ now commercially available

hidden_shadows_face.jpgBrain Waves is reporting that two companies are now advertising brain-based lie detection services based on fMRI brain-scanning technology.

This technology works differently from traditional polygraph-based techniques which measure arousal in the body and are based on the idea that we become more stressed (and hence, more aroused) when telling lies.

Polygraphs are notoriously unreliable and are known to be easily fooled.

In contrast, newer ‘lie detection’ technology typically uses an approach called the Guilty Knowledge Test (pdf) which relies on recognition.

It is known that there are distinct patterns of brain activation when someone recognises a previously seen piece of information, compared to when they do not.

In the Guilty Knowledge Test, a suspected murderer might be shown items from the crime scene to see whether these particular patterns of activation are found. If a recognition pattern is found, this might suggest that they were present at the scene.

The potential use of this technology has raised some serious ethical concerns, however, (see this pdf on neuroprivacy) as it has been touted for use on people without their consent, such as in cases of terrorism or goverment intelligence gathering, and it is still not known exactly how accurate or how easily fooled such tests are.

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered Brain Ethics also has an engaging post on this topic.

Link to Brain Waves on fMRI ‘lie detection’ services.
pdf of paper on Guilty Knowledge Test.
pdf of paper on ‘neuroprivacy’.

Even paranoids have enemies

telco_tower.jpgOhio’s Free Times has an article on people who believe they are being targeted by top-secret mind-control technology. They regularly lobby government to legislate against such technology, while others claim they are, in fact, experiencing psychosis.

Although distressed, many of the people who have such experiences do not seem particularly disabled by them and are able to run their lives quite effectively, even creating complex websites to make their case.

This, and the fact that many believe that these experiences are due to top-secret technology (which, by it’s nature, can’t be checked out) means that these experiences are not clear-cut signs of psychosis, despite the fact that they resemble some experiences found in people with schizophrenia.

To muddy the waters further, people who are very likely to be mentally ill and experience similar things are likely to be also part of online ‘mind control’ communities (as mentioned previously on Mind Hacks).

Meanwhile, proponents of the existence of mind-control technology point to the CIA’s MKULTRA project which genuinely did test (mainly drug-based) mind manipulation techniques on unsuspecting members of the public.

This leaves a huge grey area for the DSM diagnostic manual, that defines a delusion as a belief that is (among other things) false. In this case, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find out whether beliefs in secret mind-control technology are true or not.

Link to Ohio Free Times article ‘Insanity, Defense’ (via anomalist).

Evo-psychiatry

Brain Ethics has just picked up on the recent development of “evolutionary psychiatry” (evo-psychiatry for short) that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of how we have evolved to become susceptible to disabling thought and behaviour patterns.

Evolutionary approaches to disease – including mental disease – is an attempt to describe and explain the design characteristics that make us susceptible to the disease (from Nesse & Williams, 1996). The evolutionary trajectories of humans is far from a travel towards perfection. We are full of errors and somatic and mental shortcomings – and the appendix, near-sightedness, and a bottleneck attentional system and the like are examples of this.

Another important issue is that the border between normal and abnormal psychology is becoming increasingly muddled. That may sound as a problem, but it’s actually caused by a change in our understanding of how our minds come to be, and especially how normal variation extends into pathological domains. In this sense, it’s hard to draw waterproof boundaries between normal and abnormal psychology. We work on a continuum, and the branch of modern evolutionary psychiatry makes a good case for such an approach.

The post discusses a recent special issue of the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry (snappy title!) that discusses the various approaches in the field, and how they could help better understand mental illness.

Link to Brain Ethics on evo-psychiatry.

2006-06-23 Spike activity

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

spike.jpg

Science reports that researchers have found an inhibitor for the most potent known neurotoxin.

Brain-scanning for the effect of car brands. Brain Ethics casts a skeptical eye over the research.

Rare nerve disease gene found to be caused by mutation in a single gene.

Interesting new blog on psychology and neuroscience seems to be going strong.

Neuroscientist Shelley Batts analyses Red Bull’s effect on the brain.

New study suggests that the antidepressant paroxetine (also known as Seroxat or Paxil) doesn’t seem to increase birth defects as previously thought.

Cognitive Daily look at the psychology of love, happiness, and arranged marriage.

Scientific American on the suprising ability of young babies to predict the actions of others.

Wonderful posts from Pure Pedantry on the genetics and heritability of mental attributes and a follow up from Gene Expression.

Asylum from the modern world

prison_cage.jpgPBS have put an award winning documentary about the number of mentally ill people in America’s prisons online.

The programme recently won the Grand Prize in the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and asks difficult questions about why so many people with severe mental illness are inmates in the US prison system.

Fewer than 55,000 Americans currently receive treatment in psychiatric hospitals. Meanwhile, almost 10 times that number — nearly 500,000 — mentally ill men and women are serving time in U.S. jails and prisons. As sheriffs and prison wardens become the unexpected and often ill-equipped caretakers of this burgeoning population, they raise a troubling new concern: Have America’s jails and prisons become its new asylums?

The programme makes an interesting contrast to Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum written in 1885 by Mary Huestis Pengilly, and now available online as a Project Gutenberg EBook.

Pengilly describes the experience of being treated like a prisoner in the asylum, which used handcuffs and restraints for the ‘patients’ resident there.

While a century ago, asylums were virtually prisons, it seems increasingly, that prisons are now becoming asylums.

Link to PBS show The New Asylums.
Link to Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum (via Dana Leighton).

Psyche on consciousness and self-representation

sculpture_face.jpgA new issue of respected online consciousness journal Psyche has just been published with a special issue on self-representation and consciousness.

The issue debates the idea that mental states are only conscious when they are structured both to represent a particular object of thought and themselves.

Take the ticking of a clock. The brain will support a mental representation of this sound, even when you’re not conscious of it.

The self-representation hypothesis argues that for the ticking to be consciously available, the mental representation must ‘describe’ both the sound, and itself (“I’m a mental state of a ticking clock”) so the rest of the conscious mind can access and manipulate it.

However, some have argued that this theory requires an infinite number of descriptions and redescriptions and so can’t be plausible.

The various articles in the issue are written by some of the most active philosophers of mind and make for fascinating reading.

By the way, the use of ‘iff’ in the introduction is not a typo, it’s a shorthand used by philosophers for if and only if.

Link to Psyche journal.
pdf of introduction to special issue.

Pentagon memo lists homosexuality as mental disorder

According to a news report from NBC, it seems the Pentagon are still stuck way back in 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders:

WASHINGTON – A Pentagon document classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder, decades after mental health experts abandoned that position.

The document outlines retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities, and in a section on defects lists homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders.

Link to article ‘Pentagon memo: Homosexuality a disorder’ (via BB).

The science of empathy

baby_foot_in_hand.jpgThe Times recently published a curious article on the science of empathy after a case where an eight year-old girl broke her leg and several drivers apparently drove past without caring to stop and help.

Apart from the grating “empathy has a physical location” (the spirit of phrenology lives on…) it’s a brief but interesting look at some of the emerging research into empathy, although doesn’t do a great job of tying it together into a coherent overview.

For those wanting a more in-depth (and more accurate) look at the neuroscience of empathy, a 2003 review article (pdf) by Drs Jean Decety and Philip Jackson is a fantastic four-page romp through the recent research in the area.

Link to article ‘In a sorry state of mind’.
Link to Decety and Jackson article on empathy.

Kandinsky’s roaring colours

KadinskyCompositionVII.jpgThe Telegraph has an article on an upcoming exhibition at London’s Tate Modern gallery that shows how Kandinsky used his synaesthesia to create the world’s first truly abstract paintings.

Kandinsky discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin in Moscow: “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.” In 1911, after studying and settling in Germany, he was similarly moved by a Schoenberg concert and finished painting Impression III (Konzert) two days later. The abstract artist and the atonal composer became friends, and Kandinsky even exhibited Schoenberg’s paintings in the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich in the same year.

The exhibition will run from June 22nd to October 1st and has a number of accompanying educational events.

Link to article ‘The man who heard his paintbox hiss’ (via 3Quarks).
Link to details of exhibition from Tate Modern.

Better living through neurochemistry?

ritalin_tablets.jpgThe use and abuse of psychiatric medication has been a hot topic in the news recently with discussion about whether we are too keen to medicate ourselves, and too keen to medicate our children, all in the hope of improving performance and behaviour.

The Washington Times Post recently published a widely circulated article, on the extent of ‘smart pill’ abuse on US college campuses. These ‘smart pills’ are largely pharmaceutical drugs designed to treat conditions where attention or alertness is impaired, such as ADHD and narcolepsy.

They include amphetamine-related drugs such as Adderall, Dexedrine and Ritalin; and non-amphetamine drugs such as Provigil and Strattera. These are often acquired from people who have genuine prescriptions.

The other side of the coin is that these drugs are available illicitly, partly because of the massive increase in prescriptions of these sorts of drugs to children and young people.

NPR’s Talk of the Nation show discussed the extent and effects of prescribing psychiatric drugs for young people in a recent show with guests David Cohen, professor of social work from Florida International University and Jeffrey Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Link to Washington Post article ‘A Dose of Genius’.
Link to NPR Psychiatric Medication Debate (via World of Psychology)