Mind Hacks

Neuropsychologist Paul Broks’ exploration of how brain injury affects selfhood, Into The Silent Land, has been made into a play that is currently showing in the Soho Theatre in London’s West End.

The production is entitled On Ego and asks the question:

“What are we? Skin, bone and a hundred billion brain cells? Or is there something more? How does the conscious “you” clamber from the numb darkness of the brain box out into a world of people and places, pleasure and pain, love and loss?”

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that a book of case studies of brain injured patients has been turned into a theatre production, as Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was turned into an opera.

On Ego finishes on the 7th January.

Link to information on play.
<a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1657096,00.html
“>Link to Observer article about On Ego
Link to American Scientist interview with Broks.

Following advice from the Committee on Safety of Medicines, the only SSRI-type anti-depressant that UK clinicians can prescribe to children and teenagers is fluoxetine. The risk of suicide and self-harm associated with the use of the other drugs in the SSRI family has been judged to outweigh their benefit.

But speaking at a conference at the Institute of Psychiatry recently, Dr. Paramala Santosh, Consultant in Developmental Neuropsychiatry and Neuropharmacology at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said that the absolute size of the benefit of the banned drugs was often no less, and sometimes more than the effect size found for fluoxetine – it’s just that in the trials for the banned drugs, the size of the placebo effect had been so much larger.

Could this be a fundamental flaw in placebo-controlled trials? The effectiveness of drugs is measured against a placebo effect, but the size of that placebo effect isn’t constant and varies from one trial to another. So potentially, an inferior drug could be deemed effective in a trial where the placebo effect was weak.

Of course NICE guidelines state psychotherapy should be the first line treatment for depressed children, but with too few therapists available, it’s vital that effective drugs aren’t banned unnecessarily.

Continue reading “A problem with placebo-controlled trials?”

Research on smell – what scientists call olfaction – is discussed in the December issue of the Reader’s Digest magazine in an article by Paula Dranov. She explains how smells are composed of molecules that bind to our smell receptors located at the top of the nasal cavity. According to Nobel Prize-winner Linda Buck “A slight change in the chemistry of an orange scent and you get something that smells like sweaty socks”.

Linda Buck and Richard Axel won the 2004 Nobel Prize for medicine for identifying the approximately 1000 genes (3 per cent of the human genome) that code for the hundreds of smell receptors.

The article also mentions research looking at how smells could be used to help obese people eat less, based on the idea that satiety has less to do with feeling full and more to do with our senses of smell and taste feeling satisfied.

Brain damage can affect our sense of smell with unwelcome consequences. Dranov describes the case of Melissa Wittenborn who lost her sense of smell after an ice skating accident. A hit on her head caused her brain to shudder inside the skull, severing a nerve in the olfactory area. Wittenborn said “I’m missing out on so much, such as smelling my kids and husband when they get out of the shower”.

Losing one’s sense of smell can also be a sign of neurological illnesses like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Multiple Sclerosis.

Of course, smell is intimately related to memory. There’s a wealth of research showing that smell can aid recall, but there’s also more recent research showing that irrelevant smells can hinder memory.

Link to research on smell and dieting (and lots of other smell research)
Link to research on human pheromones
Link to research on irrelevant smells
Link to research suggesting smelling nice could help in interviews
Link to research on whether humans can sense the direction of smell
Link (item 2) to the vibration theory of smell

The International Robot Exhibition concluded recently in Japan, where the world’s robot manufacturers displayed their most advanced and, in some cases, human-like creations.

The emotional response to robots was discussed by roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, who created the theory of the Uncanny Valley.

He argued that that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response of humans will become increasingly positive and empathic.

This is until a point at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive, owing to the uncanny ‘not quite human’ aspect of the robot’s behaviour. This is the point known as the Uncanny Valley (see graph as pop-up).

However, as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

Mori’s theory is controversial, with some researchers rejecting it out of hand. Nevertheless, it seems intuitively plausible, and still influences robot design and engineering.

Link to excellent Wikipedia article on the ‘Uncanny Valley’.
Link to 2005 International Robot Exhibition.
Link to Coriolinus’ photos of the exhibition (via BoingBoing).

A long running web journal, the Science and Consciousness Review, has relaunched with a new look and growing content.

The journal is run by three academic scientists who want to open up consciousness research and discussion to the internet. The journal contains book reviews, summaries of new papers and internet resources.

One of the most interesting recent posts is about the increasingly comprehensive Consciousness Studies Wikibook, which is a becoming a dynamic textbook on consciousness science.

Link to Science and Consciousness Review.
Link to Consciousness Studies Wikibook.