The world of psychology blogging gets bigger and bigger – or at least my knowledge of it does. Welcome Cognitive Daily – ‘a new cognitive psychology article nearly every day’, and that has to be a good thing
2005-03-04 Spike activity
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Judges are likely to rate people who perform last in a competition more highly, regardless of their ability.
Boston authorities are investigating an ex-stripper to see if she has been pretending to be a psychologist.
An excellent article on the burgeoning field of ‘neurotheology‘ – V.S. Ramachandran’s experiments on religion and temporal lobe epilepsy suggests they people with the condition may react more strongly to religious concepts.
Members of Mensa are to be DNA tested to study the link between high intelligence and dementia.
Article on Harvard psychologists’ studies of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
Mind Hacks at Foyles, March 23rd
When I was a kid, I remember making a trip to London and visiting Foyles bookshop for the first time. In the days before book superstores, Foyles was unimaginably vast, and dense, and amazing. That was a special day. Years later, there aren’t books piled everywhere, the maze of shelves and rooms has been untangled, and it’s been updated: you no longer have to get a little green ticket from an attendant before paying. It’s still got its charm, one of the best (and biggest) book selections in London, and my favourite cafe in the centre–one of the few cafes to have free wifi, good coffee, heavy wooden tables, and jazz.
What I’m coming round to is that Tom and I will be speaking about Mind Hacks at Foyles on Wednesday, March 23rd, and it’s enormously exciting to be talking in a place with such history. If you’re in London, you should come along (it’s at 6.30pm, after work, in the Gallery on the 2nd floor). It’ll be great fun–we’re going to show off some of our favourite hacks, talk about what we learn from them, and try some [gulp] audience participation in the experiments too.
More info on the Foyles site (you’ll need to get a ticket), and the publicity blurb’s below. Do come, and spread the word!
Let’s try something else too: If you use Outlook, click to add Mind Hacks at Foyles to your calendar. If you use Apple iCal, click here to add the event.
Release follows…
Quirks and Quarks
This saturday, Mind Hacks goes audio – you can hear an interview I did yesterday with a Canadian radio show, CBC’s Quirks and Quarks (“the show that defi[n]es science”!). It’s broadcast on Saturdays on CBC Radio One from 12:06 – 1pm.
You can hear me discussing the book and going through a few of the hacks. For those of you who have read the book I can’t promise a lot of added value – but hopefully I was pretty coherant, and definitely excited, and it might be a good introduction to anyone thinking of getting the book. (it was also loads of fun to do, thanks guys!)
I think you’ll be able to hear the interview over the internet as it happens, but they will also certainly put it up as an MP3 afterwards. While you’re at the site, you can browse the show’s eight year backlog of audio files, which is a pretty impressive corpus of science broadcasting.
The blurb from the Q&Q site:
Mind Hacks: Tips and Tricks for Using your Brain.
Did you know that you go blind every time you move your eyes? And that what you’re seeing affects what you’re hearing? And that you can get stronger just by thinking about it? Well, it’s all strange but true, according to a neuroscientist who’s just written a new book containing 100 Tips and Tricks for using your brain. It’s a catalogue of illusions and experiments that show just how powerful, and how peculiar, the human brain really is – and you can try them all at home.
Simulating seizures
Engineers from UC Berkley have created a mathematical model of the brain as it undergoes an epileptic seizure, and matched it with recordings taken from electrodes implanted into the brain of a person with epilepsy.
Epilepsy is often described as a ‘storm’ of electrical signals, suggesting lots of random and chaotic brain activity, but in fact, quite the opposite occurs – groups of neurons suddenly become inappropriately synchonised.
This can be seen from the image on the right – a graph of brain recordings taken from a person having a seizure. These were recorded from electrodes safely implanted into the brain by the UC Berkley team.
Instead of supporting their normal functions these neurons work in time with nearby neurons, that usually have a completely different role in the brain.
This can lead to loss of consciousness and limb shaking commonly associated with epilepsy. The rhythm of the muscle jerks are often dictated by the rhythm of the synchronised neurons.
Sometimes people just have absences, where they can lose consciousness for a few seconds with no other noticable effects. The person who has the seizure may not even know this is happening.
With some types of seizure, people may remain conscious, but have unusual sensations, feelings of deja vu, or perhaps just peculiar thoughts and mental images.
The effects of epilepsy vary greatly with the parts of the brain involved and from person to person.
The newly created mathematical model will allow researchers to create computer simulations of epilepsy, allowing theories to be tested out and ‘virtual experiments’ to take place.
Learn how to deal with epileptic seizures.
Link to item from UC Berkley News.
Link to story from sciencedaily.com.
Gay men and maps
Gay men seem to read maps in a similar way to women. Although this seems like an insigificant finding, it may help uncover some of the neural functions that are related to sexual preference, as these abilities are known to involve specific areas of the brain.
In fact, this isn’t the first study to find a similarities between gay men and women in spatial abilities. Result published in 2003 showed that both women and gay men performed better on a memory test for locations than straight men.
These sorts of abilities are known to rely heavily on area of the brain known as the hippocampus and differences in these abilities are likely to reflect differences in how these brain structures process information.
What is not clear however, is how much these differences can account for individual sexual behaviour. This is because sexual behaviour can be motivated by a wide range of different desires and motivations, all of which may be supported by complex network of brain structures. Few of these are currently known about or understood.
Link to story from New Scientist.
Link to story from The Telegraph.
Sharks, scary music and the temporal lobes
The film starts. It’s a calm day at sea and there’s nothing for miles around except for a lone fisherman, relaxing and hoping for a catch. Deep below the water, something stirs. Urgent music starts, your adrenaline starts pumping and you know something terrible is about to occur. Your heart is racing, and according to recent research, so are your temporal lobes.
Neuropsychologist Nathalie Gosselin and her colleagues have been studying the brain’s response to scary music, and has recently published an intriguing study on a series of patients who have had parts of their temporal lobes and amygdala surgically removed, to treat otherwise untreatable epilepsy.
Gosselin’s team played the patients various pieces of music and found that although they could recognise peaceful, happy and sad music, their perception of scary music was impaired.
This wasn’t a problem with sensory monitoring of the music, as the patients performed normally when asked to detect subtle timing errors which had been implanted into some of the pieces.
It has been known for a while that the amygdala (which are located in the inner temporal lobes) are involved in the perception of emotion in other people’s faces, and this study shows that these areas may be essential in understanding fearful emotions in music, and perhaps other abstract aspects of the world.
Link to study summary.
Research Digest blog
Mind Hacks contributor Christian Jarrett [Hacks #18, #62, #66] has started a blog for the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. Writes the BPS:
Each fortnight we send out an email full of fun, engaging accounts of the most exciting new research, together with invaluable syllabus advice. This unmissable service is aimed primarily at undergraduate and A-level students, but academics have been signing up too, either to help with their teaching or simply to keep abreast of the best research outside of their specialist area.
So now you can get via blog rather than via email – and contribute comments back on papers Christian has summarised.
The science and curiosities of psychology
Professor Anthony Walsh has compiled a comprehensive guide to psychology, full of curiosities, images and tutorials.
Some of my favourites include images of trepanning devices from the middle ages, a case study of Mollie Fancher, a curious patient from the 19th century and a Dr Walsh’s own guide to classroom decorum!
This is one of the most comprehensive online psychology resources I’ve discovered as yet, and certainly one of the most fun to browse through.
Good starting points are his pages on:
* Introduction to Psychology
* Abnormal psychology
* Statistical methods in behavioural science
better to light a candle?
She says: It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness
He says: I wouldn’t be so sure, maybe a candle would destroy your night-vision – without the candle your eyes could adjust to the lowered light levels (a process called adaptation, [Hack #26])
She says: But if you’re in total darkness, there’s no light at all to adjust to seeing
He says: Good point, so maybe it should be “It’s better to wait for a bit, then, if your eyes don’t adjust, you should light a candle rather than curse the darkness”
She says: How long do you have to wait until you know?
He says: Ah well, the cone receptors in the eye – which let you see colour – adapt fully after about 5 minutes. But it takes about 30 minutes for the rod receptors to fully adapt. These are the important ones for night vision, since they are specialised in detecting light or dark – which is presumably the fundamental information you are interested in.
She says: Okay. So it should be “It’s better to sit in the dark for up to 30 minutes doing nothing, then light a candle rather than curse the darkness”?!
He says: Oh, you don’t have to do nothing. Adaptation happens at the retina. You can prove this to yourself by adapting to the dark and then looking at a light with only one eye. One eye will adjust to the light, and the other (which you kept closed) will keep it’s dark adaptation. Now if you go back to darkness you can switch between being blind (in your light adapted eye) and being able to see (in your other eye), just by openning and closing your eyes alternately. So, you can do anything you want with the rest of your brain, it shouldn’t matter.
She says: So talking would be okay?
He says: Talking would be fine. Or whistling.
She says: So “It’s better to wait in the dark to see if your eyes dark adapt (you can do anything you want while you’re waiting) and only then, if they don’t, light a candle rather than curse the darkness”
He says: You could even curse the darkness while you’re waiting and get it out of the way. And really a red light would be better than a candle, because red spectrum light doesn’t affect your dark adaptation (which is why cabin lights in aeroplanes and ships are red).
She says: “It’s better to wait in the dark to see if your eyes dark adapt (you can do anything you want while you’re waiting) and only then, if they don’t, light a candle rather than curse the darkness. But it would be better if you had a red light rather than a candle for preference”
He says: That’s it
She says: Snappy. I like it
He says: Someone should tell Amnesty
2005-02-25 Spike activity
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
An area of the brain may be responsible for warning us of risky outcomes and the possibility of making future mistakes.
New Scientist publishes a lead article on the use of psychedelic drugs for treating mental distress online.
Recent evidence suggests that some migraines may be linked to heart minor heart problems.
The relationship between distance and clarity of vision in face recognition research leads to important evidence for a murder trial.
Research shows that men are more committed to ‘e-relationships’ than women and internet dating relationships are generally more successful than previously thought.
A detailed diary kept by a mother of an autistic child leads to important insights into the development of play and social skill in autism. Other research shows that autistic people may have better visual skills than others.
Researchers measure the change to visual perception in a particular area of space when we focus our attention without moving our eyes.
New series of BBC ‘All in the Mind’ online
‘All in the Mind’, BBC Radio 4’s programme on the mind, brain and mental health starts a new season this week.
Each week’s edition is archived on the programme’s website, so you can listen in to the latest. The website also has a comprehensive archive of previous shows, so you can revisit any programme from the last few years.
Link to BBC ‘All in the Mind’ website
‘Mirror neurons’ track thoughts and intentions
In research published in PLoS Biology, scientists led by Marco Iacoboni discovered that the brain’s “mirror neurons” are active when we are trying to work out other people’s thoughts and intentions.
‘Mirror neurons’ are a set of cells in the frontal lobe of the brain, named because as well as being active when we execute actions, they are also active when we observe the actions of someone else.
Iacoboni and his colleagues asked participants to watch various movie clips of actions and related scenes in a fMRI scanner. In their analysis, they contrasted the brain activity from actions where their was an obvious intention (like picking up a sandwich) with actions where no obvious intention was implied.
They discovered that part of the activity in the ‘mirror neuron’ system was specifically related to perceiving intentions, rather than watching actions in general.
The ability to understand other people’s intentions is known as “theory of mind” and is considered one of the building blocks of social interaction. This is the first study to show how the ‘mirror neuron’ system may be involved in reading others’ intentions and desires, and is an important step in understanding how the brain supports social functioning.
This is part of an increasingly popular area of science known as social cognitive neuroscience, which aims to understand the psychology and neuroscience of person-to-person interaction.
Synopsis of study, and a news story discussing it.
Full text of the study from PLoS Biology.
The one hundred most influential works in cognitive science
The Cognitive Science society has voted on The one hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century. Although we have tended to refer to the contents of Mind Hacks as ‘cognitive neuroscience’, much of what we’ve written about is classic cognitive science material. It was this discipline that first aimed to use a information processing view of mind to synthesise work in linguistics, artifical intelligence, ethology, biology and experimental psychology (and I’m sure a few others). The relevance to the more recent ‘cognitive neuroscience’, and to the spirit of ‘Mind Hacks’, should be obvious. So have a browse of the top 100. There’s quite a few that get cited here and there in the book, and lots of other gems that might catch your interest.
Book links
Already own Mind Hacks? You’ll know that there are many links to demos on the Web, and in the End Notes. So you don’t have to type these in, we’ve put all the book links on a single page. Keep it handy! We’ll be updating that page to give replacements for dead links as-and-when they happen.
(Still undecided? The book page now excerpts some of our reviews too.)
How to open the brain to everyone
The development of science needs the free flow of information, so scientists can both build on and test the work of others, and so the public can make informed democratic decisions about the role of science in society.
Most scientific journals are run by publishing companies that own the articles they publish. In fact, the results from the majority of publically funded science appears in these journals.
Why is so much science owned by private companies ? Part of the reason is that scientists jobs often depend on how many publications they produce, and there is a hierarchy of journals, so publishing in some journals (typically the more established and privately owned ones) counts for more in a scientist’s career.
Many scientists would like to publish in open access journals but don’t want their careers to suffer or to be out of a job.
The following suggests some ways in which you can support open access journals to boost their value in the science community, prevent career dilemmas, and help open up scientific research for the benefit of all.
Mind Hacks 
