Mind Hacks

The new edition of Scientific American Mind has hit the shelves and two articles are freely available online: one on ‘smart drugs‘ and the other on the problem of consciousness.

The article on ‘smart drugs’ or ‘cognitive enhancers’ is by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga – most renowned for his work on split-brain patients.

Gazzaniga examines the ethical implications of having a society cranked-up on pharmaceutical brain enhancers, and looks at the science behind some of the most recent developments in the field.

He makes one particularly interesting point in relation to the relatively developed field of memory enhancing drugs, which have the potential to make the important process of forgetting more difficult:

For a society that spends significant time and money trying to be liberated from past experiences and memories, the arrival of new memory enhancers has a certain irony. Why do people drink, smoke marijuana and engage in other activities that cause them to take leave of their senses? Why are psychiatry offices full of patients with unhappy memories they would like to lose? And why do victims of horrendous emotional events such as trauma, abuse or stressful relationships suffer from their vivid recollections? A pill that enhances memory may lead to a whole new set of disorders.

The article on consciousness is by Christof Koch, who highlights recent research which has looked for the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ – i.e. which parts of the brain are active when conscious experience is known to occur.

This is a common but controversial approach to understanding consciousness, and one that has been championed by Koch in his own work.

Additional articles that appear in the print edition only include a discussion of the developing mind of infants and what it could tell us about the differences between men and women, the psychology of child-parent interaction and how it is understood (or misunderstood) by the courts, plus an exploration of synaesthesia.

Link to Scientific American Mind.

The Times has just published an article by neuropsychologist Paul Broks on the concept of the self and how it becomes distorted when affected by mental illness or brain injury.

The self has a fascinating history in mind and brain science as the concept has changed considerably over the years.

In the first chapter of the book The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry Berrios and Markov√° track how our modern-day idea of the self shows only traces in the thinking of the early Greek philosophers. It wasn’t until St Augustine that the self was defined as a ‘private inner space’.

17th century philosopher John Locke doubted the self was anything more than the ability of memory to give the illusion of continuity, when in reality, the mind was being bombarded with constantly changing thoughts and perceptions.

The ‘self’ has become a key concept in psychiatry where psychosis, and particularly schizophrenia, were first defined by many influential psychiatrists as a breakdown in the integration of the self.

Perhaps for this reason, schizophrenia is often confused with ‘multiple personality disorder’, although the two are considered distinct by psychiatrists.

Nevertheless, people who ‘hear voices‘ – an experience that also occurs in people who aren’t considered mentally ill – often experience them as having distinct personalities. In effect, these are distinct and autonomous selves within an individual’s self-consciousness.

On the more mundane level, phrases like “I’m not feeling myself today” suggest that we hold multiple ideas of who and what our self is, and that we can experience other forms of self-hood.

Broks’ article deals with some of the ways the self has been explained by notable neuroscientists and psychologists, and how this abstract notion can arise from the seemingly mechanical function of the biological brain.

Link to Broks’ article on the self.
Link to excerpt from The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry.

Today’s featured article on Wikipedia is a fantastic piece on one of the most mysterious areas of the brain – the cerebellum.

There are more connections in the cerebellum than in the whole of the rest of the brain put together, yet it is still not clear what sort of contribution it makes to thought and behaviour.

It is known that it is essential for movement, as damage to this area can produce tremor and other movement disorders – such as a condition called cerebellar ataxia.

Curiously, it also seems to be involved in almost every other form of mental activity.

If you want a reliable way of annoying anyone presenting results from a brain scanning study, put your hand up and ask what the activity in the cerebellum signifies. It almost always occurs, but is very difficult to explain with our current understanding.

The Wikipedia article is a great summary of current knowledge though, and gives an insight into an area where neuroscience is increasingly going to focus its sights as time goes on.

Link to Wikipedia article on the cerebellum.

Neuroscientist Christof Koch manages to write an odd article on consciousness and gets an obscure word into the title of a piece published in The Scientist.

Apparently ‘inchoate’ (I had to look it up) means “partially but not fully in existence”, which pretty much sums up the article.

It starts with a brief overview of the history of consciousness and then gives a few snapshots of recent research projects, all of which seems fine until there’s a strange paragraph on a study of mice who have had their nicotine receptors altered…

While the β2 knockout animals move rapidly through a novel terrain with little exploration, animals in which nicotinic transmission has been restored in the VTA [ventral tegmental area] show more adaptive behavior that, if observed in humans, would be associated with planning and consciousness.

Quite how exploratory behaviour in laboratory mice is ‘associated’ with human consciousness eludes me right now.

As one of the few talking mice in existence, perhaps we should ask Mickey about his conscious experience and extrapolate to his smaller cousins?

Link to article ‘The Inchoate Science of Consciousness’.