Mind Hacks

Eric Kandel talks memory to Scientific American

Nobel prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel is featured on Scientific American’s weekly podcast where he discusses his past and current work and his speculations for the future of brain research.

Kandel has just published his autobiography In Search of Memory (ISBN 0393058638) which has got positive reviews in both the mainstream press and scientific journals.

He was also recently interviewed for Science and the City, where you can also get audio and video and a Q&A session with Kandel, and read Chapter 4 of his book.

Link to Scientific American podcast page.
mp3 of Scientific American interview.

Flat lined

After a short and rather unspectacular life, I take it Action Potential is dead then…

Why sex matters for neuroscience

Neuroscientist Larry Cahill has written an in-depth review article for Nature Reviews Neuroscience arguing that understanding the difference between men and women is essential if we are to fully comprehend brain function and behaviour.

Traditionally, research in this area focused largely on sex behaviour, and it has only been during the last decade when the sex differences have been found in other areas.

Cahill notes that this includes “emotion, memory, vision, hearing, processing faces, pain perception, navigation, neurotransmitter levels, stress hormone action on the brain and disease states. Even otoacoustic emissions (audible ‘clicks’ made by the inner ear) differ reliably between the sexes, being both louder and more frequent in female than male adults, children and infants”.

The review examines the increasing amount of research in this area, and dismisses some myths regarding sex differences, including the myth that sex differences are small and insigificant, and that they can largely be explained by the action of sex hormones (such as oestrogen or testosterone) on the brain.

The article is available online as an open-access paper.

Link to Cahill’s article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Ancient hallucinogenic ayahuasca ceremony

National Geographic sent a reporter to take part in an ancient Peruvian shamanic ritual where the hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca is used.

The article describes the reporter’s account of what sounds like a profound and terrifying experience, and discusses the culture, traditions and interest from Western science that ayahuasca has inspired.

The taking of ayahuasca has been associated with a long list of documented cures: the disappearance of everything from metastasized colorectal cancer to cocaine addiction, even after just a ceremony or two. It’s thought to be nonaddictive and safe to ingest. Yet Western scientists have all but ignored it for decades, reluctant to risk their careers by researching a substance containing the outlawed DMT. Only in the past decade, and then only by a handful of researchers, has ayahuasca begun to be studied.

At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA’s School of Medicine. In 1993 Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a native church, the Uni√£o do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotonin‚Äîone of the mood-regulating chemicals produced by the body‚Äîby increasing the number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.

Link to article ‘Peru: Hell and Back’ with video clip (via MeFi)
Link to excellent Wikipedia page on ayahuasca.

Deep thoughts

I just found a couple of Flickr groups that have caught my imagination. The first is the ‘Brains‘ group for “fans of neuroscience, cognitive science, and other studies of how the mind and brain work”, and the second is ‘Deep Thoughts‘ which has some beautiful portraits of pensive people.

The Brains group is not without its striking images though, including this photo of ‘the apical tufts of 2 cortical layer V pyramidal cells’.

By combining the groups you can move from the level of biological action of the brain to the moment of intellectual discovery revealed on the face of the thinker.

Link to Flickr ‘Brains’ group.
Link to Flickr ‘Deep Thoughts’ group.

Illusions of taste

A curious comment just added to the discussion page of Wikipedia’s illusion entry has really got me thinking:

the beginning of the article claims that all human senses can be fooled. I’ve yet to expirence an illusion of taste/smell. i.e. something salty tasting sweet. it may follow that consumption is the ‘truest’ of human expirences… [sic] Andrew

The only example that I could find on PubMed suggests that we experience taste in areas of the mouth without taste receptors, because we are fooled by the touch sensations of the food in our mouths. I could find no similar ‘smell illusions’.

If anyone knows of any examples of taste or smell illusions I’d be very interested to hear about them.

UPDATE: There’s some great answers on the comments page. Keep ’em coming. Thanks!

Sleeping pill wakes brain-injured from coma-like state?

Controversial findings were recently published in the journal Neurorehabilitation suggesting that the insomnia drug zolpidem roused three severely brain-injured patients from the coma-like persistent vegetative state (PVS).

Zolpidem is better known by its trade name Ambien, and has also been in the news recently for causing unusual sleep behaviour such as sleep-driving.

The study published by Drs Ralf Clauss and Wally Nel reported on three patients diagnosed as being in PVS. All three were temporarily but reliably roused after being given the drug each morning over a period of 3 to 6 years.

It has been suggested, however, that the patients may not have genuinely been in PVS, as this state is thought to be misdiagnosed in up to 40% of cases.

Even if these patients were misdiagnosed, the results would still be interesting for those hoping to find an effective treatment for people who have chronic problems with arousal after brain-injury.

Furthermore, the fact that the treatment was consistent over such a long period is promising. Nevertheless, the drug will need to be tested in comprehensive clinical trials to show that the treatment is widely beneficial and the improvement in these patients was not due to person-specific factors.

Link to abstract of study.
Link to write-up from New Scientist.

2006-05-26 Spike activity

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

Mixing Memory looks at research on how much children believe from what they’re told.

Canine Epilepsy Guardian Angels! No really.

A strangely vague news story suggests that measuring ‘brainwaves’ (EEG / MEG?) explains how optical illusions trick the mind. More details gratefully received.

Smile! You’re on CogSci camera! Researcher aims to record every waking hour of his child’s first three years to study development of speech. More details at this pdf.

BPS Research Digest reports that the individual characteristics of therapists may have more influence on outcome than type of therapy.

Cognitive Daily reports on the immensely cool SNARC effect.

What would be the psychological strain of immortality?

Developing Intelligence picks up on a video lecture on the mathematics of visual hallucinations.

Japanese War Tuba Hack

Via badscience.net, the Japanese War Tuba Hack! (Or maybe we’ll call it “improve sound localisation by increasing interaural distance” or something).

Similarly the way your visual system calculates depth from the different images that your two eyes get, you use the difference in when sounds arrive at your ears to calculate their location. Bigger distance between the ears means bigger differences in arrival times, means more sensitivity in detecting sound location. How do you increase the distance between the ears? Ear horns! Don’t they look great?

More here and here

New brain scan detects ‘instant’ biological changes

Brain Ethics have picked up on a new development in fMRI brain scanning technology that has the potential to detect fast changes in brain activity.

Research just published by neuroscientist Denis Le Bihan and his team has found that changes in brain activation can be detected by measuring water diffusion through neurons.

This type of water diffusion is thought to reflect the activity of the cells, but crucially, it seems it provides a more direct and quicker measure of brain activity than conventional methods.

The majority of fMRI studies use a measure of how oxygen-rich certain areas of the brain are, as it is well known that more active areas take more oxygen from the blood.

One disadvantage, is that this Brain Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) measure is relatively slow. It only seems to kick in 1-2 seconds after a brain area has been active and peaks up to 5 seconds later.

The new method from Le Bihan’s team has the potential to improve this process but there are still many unanswered questions, including exactly how the measure of water diffusion relates to the known activities of single neurons or synapses.

Link to ‘An fMRI revolution?’ from Brain Ethics.
Link to abstract of Le Bihan and colleagues’ study.

Psychedelic researcher Alexander Shulgin at 81

The Sunday Herald sent a reporter out to meet legendary chemist and psychedelic researcher Alexander Shulgin to discuss life, love and phenethylamines.

Shulgin has been the world’s foremost researcher of psychedelic compounds for many decades and has written about his research in several engaging books, including the notorious Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved.

The Sunday Herald finds him still with a huge enthusiasm for his work and eager to continue exploring.

“Primarily, it is about the conversion of a structure,” he tells me. “It’s a fun process and it’s tremendously fascinating.” He is more animated when speaking about the details of how he managed to alter a drug to change its effect than when asked about the effect those changes had when he tested the new compound on himself. In fact, for a man who has had so many psychedelic experiences, his stories of his ‘trips’ are disappointingly dull, while listening to him talk about experiments and chemical structures and hearing complex chemical names trip excitedly off his tongue is thoroughly entertaining.

“Chemistry is a music form to me,” Shulgin says and, for the past 70 years, he has been composing at a rate Beethoven would have been proud of.

Link to Sunday Herald article.
Link to Wikipedia entry on Shulgin.

John Searle on the question of consciousness

John Searle, one of the most important and controversial philosophers of mind, is featured on this week’s ABC Radio The Philosopher’s Zone discussing the question of consciousness.

Searle has been active since the 1960s and has made some of the most influential contributions to cognitive science, including the famous Chinese room thought experiment that addresses the question of whether information processing would be sufficient to account for intelligent thought.

Understandably, this has been used in arguments about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and machine consciousness.

Searle has long argued that machines cannot be conscious, and that conscious states can only be supported by biological systems.

In the programme, Searle talks about his own approach to solving the problem of consciousness, the importance of understanding neurobiology, and the dangers of getting in bed with Descartes.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript.

The Science of Happiness

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes about the psychology of happiness and pleasure in a new article for Edge.

He argues that science should be striving to understand happiness, both to capture this sublime aspect of human existence, and to enable us to increase happiness as we go about our daily lives.

For the last decade I’ve been obsessed with one problem: How well can the human brain predict the sources of its own future satisfaction? If the answer were “Very well, thank you,” then I’d be out of a job. Research suggests that I will be employed for a long time to come.

We are often quite poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future for two reasons. First, we have been given a lot of disinformation about happiness by two sources: Genes and culture. Both genes and cultures are self-perpetuating entities that need us to do things for them so that they can survive. Because we are interested in our own happiness and not theirs, both entities fool us into believing that’s what is good for them is also good for us. We believe that having children will make us happy, that consuming goods and services will make us happy. But the data show that money has minor and rapidly diminishing effects on happiness, and that parents are generally happier watching TV or doing housework than interacting with their children.

This is at a time when the Kingdom of Bhutan has included the goal of ‘national well-being’ as a part of its constitution, and UK politicians are promoting the science of happiness as the basis of future policy.

Edge also hosts a 2004 video of Gilbert discussing the mental economics of happiness and ‘affective forecasting’ – the ability of people to predict what will make them happy in the future.

Link to the ‘Science of Happiness’ from Edge.
Link to BBC News article ‘Politics of Happiness’.
Link to Daniel Gilbert’s lab homepage (with articles).

Developing Intelligence finishes ‘seven sins’ series

Cognitive scientist and owner of the Developing Intelligence blog Chris Chatham has finished his series on memory distortions, arguing that common forms of memory failure can be explained within a concise model of maintenance, search, and monitoring.

The ‘seven sins’ are a reference to a more complex model put forward by psychologist Dan Schacter, in a well-known book on the subject.

Chatham explains each in turn, and gives details of how he feels they can all be explained by more fundamental functions of the mind.

* The Seven Sins of Memory
* The Transience of Memory
* Lost keys: Memory Search Failures
* Lost in the Network: Failures of Memory Architecture
* Memory’s Gates: Failures of Monitoring
* Origins of Memory Distortion

The series has been an engaging look at some of the most important theories in contemporary memory research, as well as highlighting a few curious gems, such as the scientific basis for Freudian-style repressed memories.

Even if you don’t entirely agree with Chatham’s take on the psychology of memory, there’s plenty of food for thought in what has been a lucid series on a mysterious human ability.

Is Morgellons a marketing campaign?

The comments page of the earlier article on the psychology of Morgellons mention that there are rumours that the whole thing is a viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Philip K. Dick movie A Scanner Darkly – it’s a theory that PKD would have been pround of, but almost certainly untrue.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the idea of a new form of parasite has been used for a marketing campaign, though.

The computer game Cold Fear was marketed by a seemingly genuine website that claimed that a new form of brain parasite had been discovered (with a cleverly doctored brain scan, reproduced on the right). The real purpose of the information was only revealed some weeks later.

If the same is true of Morgellons, however, the marketeers have managed to smuggle an article into a scientific journal and persuade at least one academic scientist to throw away his career for the sake of a quick buck.

Randy Wymore, a genuine professor of Pharmacology and Physiology at Oklahoma State University, has made several public statements about his ongoing research into the condition. If it were found that he was fuelling interest into a fake disease purely for marketing purposes, he would be booted out of his profession faster than you could say ‘free popcorn’.

Secondly, if it is a viral marketing campaign, it’s not a very good one. The claimed symptoms of Morgellons are quite different from the Scanner Darkly scene where where Charles Freck and Jerry Fabin believe themselves to be infested with ‘aphids’ and are attempting to capture them in glass jars.

Nevertheless, delusional parasitosis is a link. Morgellons is claimed to be a manifestation of this psychotic syndrome, and the fictional scene is a fine description of how the clinical condition can present.

If you were going to create a covert marketing campaign though, you’d probably want a closer match, unless you only wanted to advertise to those with an interest in obscure psychopathology.

One of the best suggestions is that the rumours themselves are a marketing campaign, capitalising on the recent media interest.

Truly, this is a rumour worthy of PKD himself, a true connoisseur of conspiracy theories and mass media scepticism. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether we are living in Philip K. Dick’s reality, or if he is living in ours.

Neurochemistry of street drugs – animated!

Omni Brain managed to find a wonderful Dutch website where the neurochemistry of common street drugs is illustrated as step-by-step animations.

If you ever wondered exactly how ecstasy, cannabis, speed, cocaine, heroine, alcohol or nicotine have their effect in the brain, now’s your chance to find out.

The animations give the detailed effects of the drugs on the neurotransmitter systems with an explanation of each of the main effects of the compounds.

Link to Drugs and the Brain animation site (via Omni Brain).