A vision of Oliver Sacks

New York Magazine has a wonderful in-depth profile of Oliver Sacks illustrated with a simple but sublime photo portrait of the gracefully ageing neurologist.

Sacks has become much discussed in recent weeks due to the release of his new book Hallucinations.

There has been much coverage, but perhaps some of the best coverage has been Will Self’s review and an interview on NPR.

However, the profile in New York Magazine stands alone – both for its careful portraiture and brilliant writing. Highly recommended.
 

Link to Oliver Sacks profile.

Work for free!

South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust are taking the piss. They’re advertising for a full-time, one year assistant psychologist post that is completely unpaid.

These jobs usually pay about £20,000-24,000 in London but despite this offer being completely exploitative they could easily fill the post for free.

The reason is because assistant psychologist jobs are one of the key steps to get on to training as a clinical psychologist which is a massively popular career in the UK.

This is partly because psychology itself became a hot topic and universities realised about 15 years ago that the subject was a money spinner, meaning many undergraduate courses regularly have about 200 students a year on them.

This put additional pressure on clinical psychology training places, which for the last decade have had about 20 applications for each place on the course.

As the competition is intense, assistant psychologist jobs are like gold dust. The NHS Trust I work in regularly takes down adverts for these jobs after about 24 hours, at which point they may have received up to 500 applications.

So finding someone to do a £20,000 assistant psychology job for free should be fairly trivial.

You can also see an additional trend at work: while you need an approved doctorate to now qualify for the profession, many hope an MSc in the same subject area – which doesn’t actually do anything except extend your academic knowledge – will help their chances.

Universities are capitalising on this demand and lots of MSc courses have started popping up all over the country, all with ‘not quite clinical psychology’ names like “foundations of clinical psychology” and “clinical applications of psychology”.

I don’t doubt they’re excellent, but that’ll be another maybe 10 grand on top of your student debt.

The effect of all this is that the not-so-well-off are inadvertently filtered out of the profession and we increasingly lack diversity in an already overly-homogeneous profession.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure this unpaid assistant psychologist job is valuable work. But not exploiting young people should also be a priority.
 

Link to piss-taking job post (via @bengoldacre)

BBC Future Column: Why is it so hard to give good directions?

My BBC Future column from last week. Original here.

Psychologically speaking it is a tricky task, because our minds find it difficult to appreciate how the world looks to someone who doesn’t know it yet.

We’ve all been there – the directions sounded so clear when we were told them. Every step of the journey seemed obvious, we thought we had understood the directions perfectly. And yet here we are miles from anywhere, after dark, in a field arguing about whether we should have gone left or right at the last turn, whether we’re going to have to sleep here now, and exactly whose fault it is.

The truth is we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves. Psychologically speaking giving good directions is a particularly difficult task.

The reason we find it hard to give good directions is because of the “curse of knowledge”, a psychological quirk whereby, once we have learnt something, we find it hard to appreciate how the world looks to someone who doesn’t know it yet. We don’t just want people to walk a mile in our shoes, we assume they already know the route. Once we know the way to a place we don’t need directions, and descriptions like “its the left about halfway along” or “the one with the little red door” seem to make full and complete sense.

But if you’ve never been to a place before, you need more than a description of a place; you need an exact definition, or a precise formula for finding it. The curse of knowledge is the reason why, when I had to search for a friend’s tent in a field, their advice of “it’s the blue one” seemed perfectly sensible to them and was completely useless for me, as I stood there staring blankly at hundreds of blue tents.

This same quirk is why teaching is so difficult to do well. Once you are familiar with a topic it is very hard to understand what someone who isn’t familiar with it needs to know. The curse of knowledge isn’t a surprising flaw in our mental machinery – really it is just a side effect of our basic alienation from each other. We all have different thoughts and beliefs, and we have no special access to each other’s minds. A lot of the time we can fake understanding by mentally simulating what we’d want in someone else’s position. We have thoughts along the lines of “I’d like it if there was one bagel left in the morning” and therefore conclude “so I won’t eat all the bagels before my wife gets up in the morning”. This shortcut allows us to appear considerate, without doing any deep thought about what other people really know and want.

“OK, now what?”

This will only get you so far. Some occasions call for a proper understanding of other people’s feelings and beliefs. Giving directions is one, but so is understanding myriad aspects of everyday conversation which involve feelings, jokes or suggestions. For illustration, consider the joke that some research has suggested may be the world’s funniest (although what exactly that means is another story):

 

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says “OK, now what?”

 

The joke is funny because you can appreciate that the hunter had two possible interpretations of the operator’s instructions, and chose the wrong one. To appreciate the interpretations you need to have a feel for what the operator and the hunter know and desire (and to be surprised when the hunter’s desire to do anything to help isn’t over-ruled by a desire keep his friend alive).

To do this mental simulation you recruit what psychologists call your “Theory of Mind”, the ability think about others’ beliefs and desires. Our skill at Theory of Mind is one of the things that distinguish humans from all other species – only chimpanzees seem to have anything approaching a true understanding that others’ might believe different things from themselves. Us humans, on the other hand, seem primed from early infancy to practice thinking about how other humans view the world.

The fact that the curse of knowledge exists tells us how hard a problem it is to think about other people’s minds. Like many hard cognitive problems – such as seeing, for example – the human brain has evolved specialist mechanisms which are dedicate to solving it for us, so that we don’t normally have to expend conscious effort. Most of the time we get the joke, just as most of the time we simply open our eyes and see the world.

The good news is that your Theory of Mind isn’t completely automatic – you can use deliberate strategies to help you think about what other people know. A good one when writing is simply to force yourself to check every term to see if it is jargon – something you’ve learnt the meaning of but not all your readers will know. Another strategy is to tell people what they can ignore, as well as what they need to know. This works well with directions (and results in instructions like “keep going until you see the red door. There’s a pink door, but that’s not it”)

With a few tricks like this, and perhaps some general practice, we can turn the concept of reading other people’s minds – what some psychologists call “mind mindfulness” – into a habit, and so improve our Theory of Mind abilities. (Something that most of us remember struggling hard to do in adolescence.) Which is a good thing, since good theory of mind is what makes a considerate partner, friend or co-worker – and a good giver of directions.

Technophobia: a talk at the Royal Institution

I’m going to be talking about technophobia, media panics and how technology really affects the mind and brain, next Tuesday at the Royal Institution in London.

The talk will be a trip through the history of technology scares – from Ancient Greece to Facebook, a look at how the modern media deals with concerns about new communications tools, and a round-up of what we actually know about the impact of technology on ourselves.

The evening will be MC’ed by Dallas Campbell and I am told there will be musical accompaniment.

Relax, I won’t be singing. No technology on earth can withstand my terrible voice.
 

Link to more information and tickets.

Brain’s nothingness centre found

Collectively Unconscious has a satirical post entitled “Brain region found that does absolutely nothing”.

Neuroscientists at the University of Ingberg have found a brain region that does absolutely nothing. Their research, presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, showed that a small region of the cortex located near the posterior section of the cingulate gyrus responded to ‘not one of our 46 experimental manipulations’…

“Over the months that followed we tried everything we knew, with over 20 different participants. IQ tests, memory tasks, flashing lights, talking, listening, imagining juggling, but there was no response. Nothing. We got more desperate, so we tried pictures of faces, TMS, pictures of cats, pictures of sex, pictures of violence and even sexy violence, but nothing happened! Not even a decrease. No connectivity to anywhere else, not even a voodoo correlation. 46 voxels of wasted space. I know dead salmons that are more responsive.”

Clearly the problem here is a lack of imagination.

A recent (genuine) study simply ran the same experimental data from an fMRI scanning session through 6,912 different possible ways of conducting the analysis.

Suddenly, activity popped up all over the brain.

As Einstein said “Imagination is more important than knowledge, because even though science strives to be an objective body of knowledge driven by a systematised method for accurately discovering causal relationships, in reality, it’s a bun fight”.

Pretty sure that was Einstein. Hang on, I’ll just check my stats. Yep, yes it was.
 

Link to satirical post on Collectively Unconscious.

A cultural understanding of autism

Nature has a fascinating article on the diagnosis of autism and how it clashes with cultures that have different forms of everyday social interaction and different standards for how children should behave.

In rural South Africa, young children may look at adults’ faces while having a conversation, but they don’t usually make direct eye contact because it is considered disrespectful. Yet a lack of eye contact is a hallmark of social deficits in people with autism, and as such it is something Western clinicians look for when diagnosing the disorder.

There are other examples of children’s behaviour – such as finger pointing to draw attention to something, or conversing with adults as if they are peers – that are commonplace in the West and included in tests of autism.

The ‘gold standard’ for diagnosing autism is a combination of the ADOS, a set of structured tasks to observe interaction with the person concerned, and the ADI, an interview with the caregiver to see how any difficulties have emerged over time.

As both were developed in London, they are based on Western / European model of social interaction. The risk is that other forms of cultural interaction can be wrongly interpreted as signs of impairment.

It’s worth saying that many cases of autism are unmistakeable as difficulties in social interaction can be quite marked.

However, as the concept of the autism spectrum has become more common, what can be variously and unsatisfactorily described as ‘high functioning’, ‘atypical’ or ‘mild’ autism, usually where difficulties are not immediately obvious, is where there is more room for cultural confusion.

The Nature article describes how various cultural tendencies eddy and flow around the concept of autism and how clinicians are now attempting to navigate the choppy waters of diagnosis.
 

Link to excellent Nature article on culture and autism.

BBC Future column: The Psychology Of Tetris

Last week’s BBC Future column. The original is here. There’s a more melancholy and personal version of this column I could have written called ‘I lost years of my life to Sid Meier’s ‘Civiliation’, but since the game is now out on iphone I didn’t have time to write it.

How the secret to the popular game’s success is that it takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in tidying up and uses it against us.

Shapes fall from the sky, all you have to do is to control how they fall and fit within each other. A simple premise, but add an annoyingly addictive electronica soundtrack (based on a Russian folk tune called Korobeiniki, apparently) and you have a revolution in entertainment.

Since Tetris was launched on the world in 1986, millions of hours have been lost through playing this simple game. Since then, we’ve seen games consoles grow in power, and with it the appearance of everything from Call of Duty to World of Warcraft. Yet block and puzzle games like Tetris still have a special place in our hearts. Why are they are so compelling?

The writer Jeffrey Goldsmith was so obsessed with Tetris that he wrote a famous article asking if the game’s creator Alexey Pajitnov had invented “a pharmatronic?” – a video game with the potency of an addictive drug. Some people say that after playing the game for hours they see falling blocks in their dreams or buildings move together in the street – a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect. Such is its mental pull, there’s even been the suggestion that the game might be able to prevent flashbacks in people with PTSD.

I had my own Tetris phase, when I was a teenager, and spent more hours than I should have trying to align the falling blocks in rows. Recently, I started thinking about why games like Tetris are so compelling. My conclusion? It’s to do with a deep-seated psychological drive to tidy up.

Many human games are basically ritualised tidying up. Snooker, or pool if you are non-British, is a good example. The first person makes a mess (the break) and then the players take turns in potting the balls into the pockets, in a vary particular order. Tetris adds a computer-powered engine to this basic scenario – not only must the player tidy up, but the computer keeps throwing extra blocks from the sky to add to the mess. It looks like a perfect example of a pointless exercise – a game that doesn’t teach us anything useful, has no wider social or physical purpose, but which weirdly keeps us interested.

There’s a textbook psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. In the 1930s, Zeigarnik was in a busy cafe and heard that the waiters had fantastic memories for orders – but only up until the orders had been delivered. They could remember the requests of a party of 12, but once the food and drink had hit the table they forgot about it instantly, and were unable to recall what had been so solid moments before. Zeigarnik gave her name to the whole class of problems where incomplete tasks stick in memory.

The Zeigarnik Effect is also part of the reason why quiz shows are so compelling. You might not care about the year the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded or the percentage of the world’s countries that have at least one McDonald’s restaurant, but once someone has asked the question it becomes strangely irritating not to know the answer (1927 and 61%, by the way). The questions stick in the mind, unfinished until it is completed by the answer.

Game theory

Tetris holds our attention by continually creating unfinished tasks. Each action in the game allows us to solve part of the puzzle, filling up a row or rows completely so that they disappear, but is also just as likely to create new, unfinished work. A chain of these partial-solutions and newly triggered unsolved tasks can easily stretch to hours, each moment full of the same kind of satisfaction as scratching an itch.

The other reason why Tetris works so well is that each unfinished task only appears at the same time as its potential solution – those blocks continuously fall from the sky, each one a problem and a potential solution. Tetris is a simple visual world, and solutions can immediately be tried out using the five control keys (move left, move right, rotate left, rotate right and drop – of course). Studies of Tetris players show that people prefer to rotate the blocks to see if they’ll fit, rather than think about if they’ll fit. Either method would work, of course, but Tetris creates a world where action is quicker than thought – and this is part of the key to why it is so absorbing. Unlike so much of life, Tetris makes an immediate connection between our insight into how we might solve a problem and the means to begin acting on it.

The Zeigarnik Effect describes a phenomenon, but it doesn’t really give any reason for why it happens. This is a common trick of psychologists, to pretend they solved a riddle of the human mind by giving it a name, when all they’ve done is invented an agreed upon name for the mystery rather than solved it. A plausible explanation for the existence of the Effect is that the mind is designed to reorganise around the pursuit of goals. If those goals are met, then the mind turns to something else.

Trivia takes advantage of this goal orientation by frustrating us until it is satisfied. Tetris goes one step further, and creates a continual chain of frustration and satisfaction of goals. Like a clever parasite, Tetris takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in getting things done and uses it against us. We can go along with this, enjoying the short-term thrills in tidying up those blocks, even while a wiser, more reflective, part of us knows that the game is basically purposeless. But then all good games are, right?

A brief reheating of the refrigerator mother

The Telegraph has a well-intentioned but confused article about how child neglect affects the brain and what can be done about it.

What’s the difference between these two brains? asks The Telegraph. “The primary cause of the extraordinary difference between the brains of these two three-year-old children,” says the journalist, “is the way they were treated by their mothers.”

According to the paper “The child with the much more fully developed brain was cherished by its mother, who was constantly and fully responsive to her baby. The child with the shrivelled brain was neglected and abused.”

Firstly, it’s worth saying that reduced brain size is clearly related to neglect and abuse but the images are not a typical representation of this.

These scans were originally published in an article on child abuse by neuroscientist Bruce Perry who drew them from an unpublished abstract [pdf] of a study on neglect in children, which didn’t control for malnutrition or drug exposure during pregnancy.

They’re described as showing CT scans of three-year-olds, one normal and the other neglected who has a head size smaller 97% of children his or her age. This would make him or her almost diagnosable with microcephaly, a neurological disorder of small head size usually caused by a genetic defect.

This difference in brain size has actually been found in those without the genetic defect. In fact, this difference was found in a study of severely neglected Romanian orphans but severe malnutrition was also a significant factor.

In other words, unless you include ‘starvation’ under the concept or ‘poor interaction with the mother’ the scans really don’t represent what typically happens to children who are emotionally neglected.

Oddly, the Telegraph article spins brain development as specifically depending on the mother, giving an undercurrent of traditional mother-blaming.

Neurologists are beginning to understand exactly how a baby’s interaction with their mother determines how, and indeed whether, the brain grows in the way that it should.

The ghost of the refrigerator mother rises again.

The piece is full of other neurological howlers: “Eighty per cent of brain cells that a person will ever have are manufactured during the first two years after birth” is just baffling, considering we are born with almost all the neurons we will ever have.

The number of synapses – connections between brain cells – does increase after birth but at most by about two thirds. The number peaks between about one and four years, depending on the brain area, and then it rapidly decreases as the brain removes unused connections in a process called synaptic pruning.

The words of neuroscientist Allan Schore seem to have be carefully selected to bolster this scientific misunderstanding, despite the fact his actual quotes do not suggest that he thinks brain cells ‘grow’ after birth.

Furthermore, the idea that “if a baby is not treated properly in the first two years of life, the genes for various aspects of brain function, including intelligence, cannot operate” is seemingly a fuzzily remembered misunderstanding of the role of stress on the epigenetics of neural development.

In fact, it looks like the piece has been written to support a government commissioned report by MP Graham Allen developed from an earlier report by think tank The Centre for Social Justice.

Both present the brain scans, somewhat misleadingly, as a reasonable illustration of emotional neglect, and the first report, scientifically, is a bit ropey. The second though, is surprisingly good.

It actually talks little about the brain, doesn’t feel the need to get into mother-blaming, argues that more support is needed for young children below the age of three from early intervention programmes.

This is a valuable approach and a valid point of view, which The Telegraph article is right behind, but neither brain-shrivelling mothers nor scare tactics are needed.
 

Link to somewhat confused Telegraph article.
Link to scientific review on brain effects of child abuse.

British Psy Ops in Afghanistan

BBC News has an extremely rare article on the UK military’s psychological operations group and their work in Afghanistan.

The piece reports how the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group have been given the Firmin Sword of Peace – an accolade recognising the building of community relations awarded by, well, the UK military.

Get your plaudits where you can, that’s what I say.

Psy Ops is a combination of marketing and public relations with more targeted psychology, sociology and anthropology to measure fast moving social changes and perceptions – largely used to inform strategy and military intelligence at the local level.

The 15 (UK) Psy Ops Group rarely ever features in the media and there’s not a great deal of information about them, although most of it has been collected on this PowerBase page.

In fact, the last time 15 (UK) Psy Ops hit the headlines was when one of their unit was killed in 2008, who was most notable in the media for being the first British female solider to die in Afghanistan.

Except for that, one of the last mentions was in 2003. And now they’re press-releasing an award given to them by their own organisation and talking to reporters.

So why the PR drive? Recruitment, it seems. Commander Steve Tatham notes that “at a time most of the Armed Forces are being cut back, his unit is being expanded”.

Despite the spin, it’s not a bad article actually. Although the Group do give the ‘we’re just telling the truth’ line it does discuss the sort of approaches they take and the problems they face.
 

Link to BBC News article on UK Psy Ops in Afghanistan.
Link to Ministry of Defence press release.

Hark! What light through yonder neuron breaks

An unintentionally funny first line from a new study on the neuroscience of love.

The lifetime prevalence of romantic love is extremely high, as romantic love strikes nearly 100% of the people at one or more times during their life. As a comparison, the lifetime prevalence of experiencing any mental disorder is “only” 46.4% (National Institute of Mental Health, US).

The paper also has the oddly Shakespearean sounding line

By virtue of using a cognitive task with a full factorial design, we show that the dorsal striatum is not activated by beloved-related information per se, but only by beloved-related information that is attended

In fact, when Shakespeare wrote “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” he was probably thinking of the role of attentional modulation in the neural response to images of your lover based on the finding that activity in the dorsal striatum is only increased when the participants have to notice rather than ignore pictures of their beloved in an fMRI-based oddball task.

Angels! I think I hear the sound of angels!
 

Link to locked study.

Press Release Spam (an interlude)

Sorry to interrupt your normal psych/neuro programming, but this is just a short note to say that I have retired the tom@mindhacks.com email address. If you wish to contact me or Vaughan, please tweet us (details in rightbar).

I’ve retired the email address because of the amount of PR spam I’ve been getting, which has lowered the signal to noise ratio of this account so much it isn’t worth checking anymore. One of the reasons I get so much PR spam is because people like Vocus PR are selling my email address, to publishers and University Press offices, who then send me email about things I’m not interested in. For a while I was collecting the email addresses of these people so I could block them in gmail. My list is here. I invite you to do a search for these addresses and label them spam (warning: this list contains real people from respectable organisations, but since they work in PR I am happy never to hear from them again).

If anyone can think of a good crowdsourced way of breaking the business model of people like Vocus, I’d love to hear from you.

The neuroscience of sexual attractions

A recent edition of radio programme KERA Think has a fantastic discussion on development and the neuroscience of sexual attraction in its many forms.

The programme is a discussion with Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist who raised a lot of eyebrows by finding differences in the brain structure of gay and straight men in a 1991 study.

The science has massively advanced since then and LeVay gives a fascinating and lucid account of what know about the biology of the rainbow of sexual attraction – and where the mysteries still lie.
 

Link to programme page with streamed audio.
mp3 of podcast.

Deeper into forensic bias

For the recent Observer article on forensic science and the psychological biases that affect it, I spoke to cognitive scientist Itiel Dror about his work.

I could only include some brief quotes from a more in-depth exchange, so for those wanting more on the psychology of forensic examining, here’s Dror on how evidence can be skewed and why these effects have been ignored for so long.

What do you think has been the turning point for the forensic science community in terms of beginning to accept the role of cognitive bias in interpretation of evidence?

I think the clear cut scientific research with actual forensic examiners which was a within-subject experimental design, showing that the *same* expert, examining the *same* evidence, can reach different conclusions when they are affected by bias. The problem was also demonstrated in fingerprinting and DNA, very robust forensic domains.

I think you are very right to say that they have ‘began’. There has been a change, for example, the UK Forensic Regulator is now onboard. But there is still a way to go.

Which area of forensic science do you think is currently most susceptible to cognitive bias?

It will be the forensic science areas in which, as I like to say, the human examiner is the main instrument of analysis. These are most of the forensic domains: fingerprinting, DNA, CCTV images, firearms, shoe and tire marks, document examination, and so on. When there is no instrument that says ‘match’ or ‘no-match’ and it is in the ‘eye of the beholder’ to make the judgement, then subjectivity comes in, and is open to cognitive bias.

Essentially, forensic areas in which there are no objective criteria: where it is the forensic expert who compares visual patterns and determines if they are ‘sufficiently similar’ or ‘sufficiently consistent’. For example, whether two fingerprints were made by the same finger, whether two bullets were fired from the same gun, whether two signatures were made by the same person. Such determinations are governed by a variety of cognitive processes.

The cognitive nature of subjectivity is that it can be influenced and biased by extraneous contextual information. Forensic scientists work within a variety of such influences: from knowing the nature and details of the crime, to being indirectly pressurized by detectives, from seeing the ‘target’, to working within and as part of the police, from computer generated meta-data, to appearing in courts within an adversarial criminal justice system, and so on. The contextual influences are many and they come in many forms, some of which are subtle. So, many, most of the forensic areas are vulnerable.

It seems there is a reluctance to change procedures to minimise cognitive bias. Where does the resistance come from?

There are still forensic examiners who think that are immune to context and do not understand, let alone accept, the existence and danger of cognitive bias. They often confuse ‘bias’ (as in being racist, anti-Semitic etc) with cognitive bias; and this makes some of them think that it is an ethical issue. Forensic examiners rarely, if at all, receive training in this area and in the rare occasions that they do, they get bad training from people who do not specialise in providing training about cognitive bias in forensics.

The forensic community, as the military, police, and so on, are all very hard to change; there is a strong culture within those organisations. It is especially hard to promote change when errors are not as apparent as in other domains. If the police shoot an innocent person, then they very quickly know that they made a mistake, if a surgeon amputates the wrong leg, then they know very quickly that they made a mistake. In contrast, in the forensic domain, in real criminal cases, we do not know the ground truth, and do not really know if a mistake has happened or not. Only in very rare and special circumstances do errors surface (as in the Mayfield and McKie cases).

The courts have basically for the most part blindly accepted most of the forensic evidence. So, the examiners see no reason to change, if the courts accepts their evidence, then that is that. This may be changing. The hope is that judges will be more aware of the danger of cognitive bias and not accept forensic conclusions that are tainted with bias.
 

Link to further reading from Itiel Dror.