Life in an elevator

Scientific American has a wonderful short article on the anthropology of elevators, tackling the psychology of travelling floor to floor and how they were eventually integrated into a resistant society.

The piece is full of gems about one of our most mundane of activities and I particularly liked this on a failed attempt at waylaying early fears about the technology’s safety:

Sociologist Joseph Gittler proposed that Americans initially resisted the elevator for personal use because they didn’t quite understand how it worked and this opacity contributed to fear for their personal safety. People were asked to put their trust in a system they could not see. In the confines of the car, visions of frayed cables came easily. Not even Elisha Otis and his “safety elevator” design were initially well received. Although, in truth, his unveiling at the 1853 New York World’s Fair was perhaps a bit dramatic and may have contributed to the elevator’s worrying reputation. Otis’ design included a mechanism that would stop a falling car – a version of which is still in use today. At the World’s Fair he essentially stood on a platform rigged with his device, had someone cut the rope holding the platform up, and dropped spectacularly before coming to a complete stop. While this did wonders for his business, and helped launch Otis Steam Elevator Works, it did not necessarily discourage public concern.

In contrast to the UK, I discovered it’s normal in Colombia to say hello and goodbye to people as you enter and exit the lift. This was so strange when I first encountered it that I just assumed that people must be recognising me and my memory was at fault.

The author of the piece turns out to write the Anthropology in Practice blog which I’ve just discovered and also is a great read.
 

Link to SciAm piece on the anthropology of elevators.
Link to Anthropology in Practice blog.

BBC All in the Mind new series: war and ethics

A new series of BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind has just kicked off with the first programme looking at mental illness in war zones, the ethics of forcing psychiatric patients to take treatment in the community and whether antidepressants change our moral decision-making.

The discussion on military mental health is particularly good and goes some way to answering why UK troops show much lower rates of mental illness than US troops in the same war zones, as we discussed recently.

Also don’t miss the heated discussion on ‘community treatment orders’ or CTOs, which are a relatively recent innovation but become increasingly popular across the world.

They’re a change to the law that allows patients to told to take treatment in the community, otherwise they can be instantly taken back into hospital to be forcibly treated.

The UK introduced them in 2008 and they have been used ten times more than predicted, leading to a fierce debate about whether they are just being used to over-ride patient autonomy.

The antidepressant research, that has found the SSRIs alter how people respond to moral dillemas like the ‘trolley problem‘, is also an intriguing look into the neurochemistry of ethical choice, making for a strong start to the new series.
 

Link to BBC ‘All in the Mind’ page with streamed audio.
Link to ‘Medical Matters’ page where you can get the podcast.

Drug classification is out of order

Mark Easton’s BBC News blog tackles a recent study that has ranked the dangers of numerous recreational drugs – citing alcohol as the most hazardous to health ahead of even heroin and cocaine.

The study, just published in The Lancet, is interesting not just because it is yet another that shows the disconnect between official policy and the actual evidence on drug harm, but because the authors are some of the people who were sacked or resigned after the UK government got upset that they kept highlighting inconvenient evidence to this effect.

Its worth noting that ranking drug harms is an inexact science. For example, injecting any drug regularly massively increases the health risks, so opinion varies on whether you should count this is as a danger attached to a specific substance – when some drugs – like heroin, can be taken with or without injecting.

Regardless of the exact ranking, the general pattern found in this any many other studies highlights the ongoing reluctance to deal with drugs as they actually affect society.

Mark Easton’s BBC News blog is consistently excellent by the way, and a genuinely incisive attempt to get at the real evidence behind many pressing social issues.
 

Link to Mark Easton on ‘Drug Debate Hots Up’.
Link to paywalled Lancet study.

A consciousness raising exercise

I’ve just discovered the fantastic Conscious Entities blog that is full of wonderfully insightful discussions about the science and philosophy of consciousness.

As well as covering established theories it also tackles new ideas and controversies as they appear, with the fantastic coverage of philosopher Peter Hacker’s criticisms of just about everything in neuroscience and the subsequent backlash being a case in point.

Despite dealing with heavyweight issues, it’s also quite playful and I loved this explanation in the About page:

One possible source of confusion is that some of the discussions here are presented as dialogues between two different characters. One of these, whom I think of as ‘Blandula’, after the Emperor Hadrian’s verse addressed to his own soul, is represented by a sort of cherub, and is suspicious of reductive and materialist ideas: the other, (‘Bitbucket’, represented by an abacus) takes the opposite view. I hope this helps both sides to benefit from vigorous advocacy, but the two characters are merely figments of my imagination and I cannot supply email addresses for either of them.

Fun, smart, informative and, as far as I can make out, illustrated by the author.
 

Link to Conscious Entities (via @AlexKaula).

Urban thrall

RadioLab has just released a fantastic edition on how we become behaviourally enmeshed in cities and how they operate almost like independent organisms.

As always, the programme is like being wrapped in a shimmering fabric of sound and this edition looks at our relationship with the urban sprawl, from the link between the size of the city and how fast we talk, to how the infrastructure reflects the society that relies on it.

There’s no scientific metric for measuring a city’s personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can’t explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who’s walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that’s slipping away.

 

Link to RadioLab on cities.

What price sobriety (in vouchers)?

BBC Radio 4 recently ran a fascinating one-off programme called Sugaring the Pill on schemes that pay people to lose weight, get vaccinated or stay off drugs. Payment turns out to be particularly effective at keeping addicts clean and this caught my eye because it seems to go against some of the core scientific beliefs about persistent drug users.

The programme explores the ethics of payment programmes and the public’s discomfort, particularly when applied to drugs, with handing out rewards for something we should perhaps be doing anyway.

Payment as treatment is known in the medical literature as ‘contingency management’ and has been found to be most effective in keeping heroin and cocaine addicts clean.

As the programme, and the research summary linked above, describe, a typical payment scheme will give a ticket for every clean urine test – usually starting with a small value like £1, and increasing by 50p each time.

Only when the patient has completed a whole series of clean drug tests, maybe after a month or two, can they exchange their tickets for shopping vouchers which they can spend in the high street.

The fact that these schemes are so effective is surprising, because they rely on abilities thought to be lacking or impaired in addicts – mainly the capacity to delay rewards and gratification.

There is now a host of research showing that addicts have problems with temporal discounting. We all have the tendency to judge future benefits as significantly less important than immediate ones but this seems to be enhanced in drug users who greatly overly prioritise rewards that arrive sooner.

Also, persistent drug use is widely believed to alter the brain’s reward system so positive reinforcement (wanting benefits) becomes less persuasive than negative reinforcement (the desire to escape an unpleasant sensation).

Similarly, research suggests that in addiction, the desire to take drugs become less modifiable by our executive system and so less amenable to voluntary control.

So, for people who should be primarily motivated by immediate chemical rewards over long-term abstract benefits, a slowly accumulating shopping voucher scheme would be the last thing you would predict to have such a reliable effect on keeping people off the smack or blow.

I note this purely as a curious inconsistency and if you have any suggestions that might explain it, do add them in the comments.

The BBC programme is excellent, by the way, and is also available as a podcast.
 

Link to Sugaring the Pill info and streamed version.
Link to page with podcast (for four weeks).

Khat among the pigeons

All in the Mind kicks off a new three-part series on ‘Cultural Chemistry’ with a programme about the effects and politics of the stimulant khat which has an important place in several East African cultures.

The plant is used widely in Somalia, Ethiopia and Yemen and when chewed it causes a mild buzz owing to low levels of a naturally occurring amphetamine-like compound called cathinone.

Although originally rooted in Africa, the plant is available across the world although its legal status varies – from banned in the USA to completely legal in Britain.

It is used traditionally like coffee to perk people up and make them more chatty although it is often the subject of controversy because it has been linked with triggering psychosis and aggression in some people – although the scientific evidence is far from clear.

I managed to try khat once after I discovered it on sale at a grocery in Leicester. Although it did cause a slight buzz I was most struck by the taste as it is incredibly tannin-like, making the experience a little like chewing on a tea bag.

But as All in the Mind notes, as the plant is strongly linked to specific social settings, it’s difficult to understand its effects without considering the environment in which it’s taken and the programme does a fantastic job of exploring the complex mix.

Coffee is next up in the ‘Cultural Chemistry’ series which should be worth keeping an eye on as there might be something a little special later on. Also, there’s more on the All in the Mind blog and a call for you to contribute your own recordings.
 

Link to All in the Mind Cultural Chemistry series on khat.
Link to more details and additional audio on the AITM blog.

It only exists if I can see colours on a brain scan

Bad Science has an excellent piece on the recent hot air from a researcher who claimed that brain activity differences between people with high and low sex drive proved that ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’ was ‘a genuine physiological disorder and not made up.’

This strikes me as an unusual world view. All mental states have physical correlates, if you believe that the physical activity of the brain is what underlies our sensations, beliefs and experiences: so while different mental states will be associated with different physical states, that doesn’t tell you which caused which. If I do not have the horn, you may well fail to see any increased activity in the part of my brain that lights up when I do have the horn. That doesn’t tell you why I don’t have the horn: maybe I’ve got a lot on my plate, maybe I have a physical problem in my brain, maybe I was raped last year. There could be any number of reasons.

But far stranger is the idea that a subjective experience must be shown to have a measurable physical correlate in the brain before we can agree that the subjective experience is real, even for matters that are plainly experiential. If someone is complaining of persistent low sex drive, then they have persistent low sex drive, and even if you could find no physical correlate in the brain whatsoever, that wouldn’t matter, they do still have low sex drive.

One of the reasons why attempts to make problems of behaviour or experience seem ‘biological’ is that the concept is strongly linked to the idea that if something is a ‘biological disorder’ we are less to blame because we have less control over the symptoms.

This is daft, of course, because although biology uses less talk of free will and agency, it is really just another level of explanation.

The beauty of a captivating picture doesn’t somehow disappear if we discuss the molecules of the paint and, in a similar way, discussing the interactions of neurons won’t mean that the problem of free will no longer applies.

But the drive to try and eliminate free will is, in part, because of the stigma still attached to many types of problems. Instead of trying to tackle stigma we often try to misguidedly reclassify the object of the stigma.

It’s like trying to fight racism by classifying a wider range of skin colours as white – it really misses the point and actually maintains the prejudice. In the same way, we should be working towards accepting all human difficulties, however they are most appropriately described by scientific theories, as valid and worthy of concern.

This does not mean all necessarily need to be classified and treated as medical disorders, but it does mean that we should respect the difficulties people face and think about constructive ways of helping ourselves and other people to tackle them.
 

Link to Bad Science on ‘Neuro-realism’.

NeuroPod on ‘bionic ears’ and training neurons

The latest edition of the excellent Nature NeuroPod podcast has just hit the wires with discussions of cochlear implants, conscious control of individual neurons, the neuroscience of Parkinson’s disease and the function of the blood-brain barrier.

The highlight for me was the section on ‘bionic ears’ or cochlear implants – the first mass produced neural implant that can help some forms of hearing loss.

As well as tackling the neuroscience of the devices, the programme also plays what it sounds like to have one, which is quite distinct from normal hearing.

There’s lots more great pieces in this month’s edition, so definitely worth catching.
 

Link to NeuroPod page.
mp3 of latest podcast.

A diagnosis of ‘Strange and Inexplicable Behaviour’

The World Health Organisation’s ICD-10 manual of diseases and health problems has a diagnosis of ‘Strange and Inexplicable Behaviour’ that gives, rather appropriately, no further explanation, except that it’s classified with code R46.2

It is from Chapter XVIII of the ICD-10 which tackles ‘Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified’.

It turns out that the whole of Section R46 is a bit of a gold mine:
 
R46.0  Very low level of personal hygiene
R46.1  Bizarre personal appearance
R46.2  Strange and inexplicable behaviour
R46.3  Overactivity
R46.4  Slowness and poor responsiveness.
R46.5  Suspiciousness and marked evasiveness
R46.6  Undue concern and preoccupation with stressful events
R46.7  Verbosity and circumstantial detail obscuring reason for contact
R46.8  Other symptoms and signs involving appearance and behaviour
 
Many thanks to my friend and colleague Jorge who pointed out this little known and under-appreciated diagnostic gem.
 

Link to ICD-10 chapter with section R46.

Ted Hughes On Thinking

Editor of The Psychologist and man about town, Jon Sutton, just sent me a fantastic monologue by poet Ted Hughes on the experience of thinking.

I’ve uploaded the piece to YouTube where you can hear Hughes’ remarkable analysis in his own characteristic voice.

The piece is almost nine minutes long but in this part Hughes describes what psychologists would now call metacognition.

There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.

There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.

And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.

I have tried to find the origin of the piece but have come up with nothing and Jon says he originally recorded it from Jarvis Cocker’s BBC 6music show but has no more details.

If you know any more about the piece, do add a note in the comments.
 

Link to Ted Hughes ‘On Thinking’ (massive thanks @jonmsutton).

2010-10-29 Spike activity

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

Two words: Zombie Neuroscience. Oscillatory Thoughts on the strange tale of how the author became one of the world’s most sought after neuroscientists for the undead.

Scientific American on how graphic warnings on cigarette packets put off occasional smokers but heavy smokers react by taking even harder drags.

When people are faced with scientific research that clashes with their personal view, they try a range of strategies to discount the findings. Excellent BPS Research Digest interview.

Esquire has a feature article on amnesic patient HM. Neuroscience served with a ‘Women We Love’ gallery – what more could you want? I can hear some of you saying a ‘Men We Love’ gallery.

Do sisters make us happier? asks The Frontal Cortex.

The Guardian has an exasperated article about the rent-a-quote psychologists and pseudo-psychologists happy to spout all kinds of nonsense about troubled footballer Wayne Rooney.

There’s a fantastic in-depth discussion about the role of cooking in human brain evolution over at Neuroanthropology.

The Boston Globe covers philosopher Peter Hacker’s block rocking challenge to neuroscientists: make sense! There’s an expanded piece where he attacks more sacred cows over at The Philosopher’s Magazine.

This week’s editor’s selection from ResearchBlogging.org focuses on psychology and neuroscience posts.

Seed Magazine has an excellent article asking ‘do smoking bans work?’

The misconduct case against Marc Hauser may be looking shaky, or it might not. Neuroskeptic covers the machinations.

The Science Show from ABC Radio National has a short but excellent discussion on how rational and human reasoning differ.

The official bloggers have been announced for the Society for Neuroscience conference and hardly any of them seem to have a blog. Fear not, Functional Neurogenesis has a list of both official and unofficial bloggers covering the event.

Newsweek has a good piece on how researching premature babies can help us understanding neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.

The excellent Addiction Inbox covers a new report by the UN on the world-wide use of synthetic highs and the ‘designer drugs’ trade.

Time has a photo essay by a photographer who has created a ‘photographic conversation’ with his autistic son.

The Encephalon mind and brain blogging carnival is back from the dead! You can read it over at Cephalove.

Discover Magazine has an excellent piece on consciousness, tinnitus (‘ringing in the ears’) and how it be treated by tweaking the brain’s tone map.

Ace forensic psychologist Karen Franklin who normally blogs at In the News has started a new blog called Witness aimed at introducing people to forensic and criminal psychology.

New Scientist has and interesting illusion that aims to combine a perceptual distortion with a beauty perception quirk.

The text of the latest annual ‘State of the Regiment’ address to the US military PSYOP units is up over at the PSYOP Regimental Blog.

The Lancet has a critical essay on genetics, the media and claims that new psychological disorders are suddenly ‘biological’.

What’s the chance that a man’s kids are not really his, biologically? Barking Up the Wrong Tree looks at the statistics.

The Atlantic has more images from the ‘Portraits of the Mind’ book on the history of depictions of the brain that we featured recently.

A handslide victory

If ever there was a scientific study destined for the Ig Nobel awards, this is it. The Economist reports on new research finding that searches for internet porn increased in US states that backed the winning party in an election.

The study was inspired by the ‘challenge hypothesis’ which states that competition and dominance raise testosterone levels in males with an increased interest in mating following soon after.

The hypothesis has largely been confirmed in animals, but psychologists Patrick and Charlotte Markey decided to see whether the effect could be seen in humans after elections:

To do this they first used a web service called WordTracker to identify the top ten search terms employed by people seeking pornography (“xvideos” was the politest among them). Then they asked a second service, Google Trends, to analyse how often those words were used in the week before and the week after an American election, broken down by state.

Their results, just published in Evolution and Human Behavior, were the same for all three of the elections they looked at—the 2004 and 2008 presidential contests, and the 2006 mid-terms (in which the Democrats made big gains in both houses of Congress). No matter which side won, searches for porn increased in states that had voted for the winners and decreased in those that had voted for the losers. The difference was not huge; it was a matter of one or two per cent. But it was consistent and statistically significant.

Less sophisticated people would make ‘hung like a donkey’ jokes at this point, but I’m far too refined as I’m sure regular readers are aware.

If you want to see the research without the fig leaf of the mainstream media, the full text of the scientific paper is available online as a pdf.
 

Link to Economist article ‘Rising to the occasion’.
Link to DOI entry and summary of paper.
pdf of full text of scientific paper.

A misdirection of mind

Scientific American has an excellent video where two neuroscientists and a street magician with remarkable pickpocketing skills explain how illusionists manipulate our attention.

It’s a hugely entertaining piece and really highlights how the idea of ‘sleight of hand’ is itself a misdirection, as the most important of the magician’s manipulations is to alter where we focus and what we expect.

The people featured in the video were all involved in the recent scientific discussions about what stage magic can teach cognitive neuroscience about the mind and brain.

You’ll also notice there is a bit of scientific sleight of hand that happens at about the 9 minute mark where the all-purpose ‘mirror neuron‘ theory is pulled out of a hat as an explanation that stretches way beyond what we actually know about the mirror system.

It doesn’t say whether mirror neurons can also saw a woman in half but I’m sure someone will suggest it in the near future.

Despite this moment of unsubstantiated speculation, the video is an excellent guide to the psychology of attention and great fun to boot.
 

Link to video ‘Neuroscience meets magic’.

An uneven distribution of traumatised soldiers

A brief insight into why US troops returning from the same war zones as UK troops show four times the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder – taken from a recent Military Medicine article on mental health treatment in the British armed forces.

The prevalence of PTSD among U.S. forces returning from Iraq has approached 20% of combat personnel. This is in contrast to U.K. forces, which have reported approximately 5% using the same screening tools. There are differences between the forces deployed, some of which may explain the differences in mental health outcomes: U.S. troops are younger, less experienced, deploy for longer tours, and are more likely to be reservists than U.K. forces, all of which are independent risk factors for the development of symptoms of PTSD. A further explanation is that the higher levels of reporting may reflect societal and cultural factors not necessarily associated with deployment.

‘Societal and cultural factors’, of course, could mean anything from the British ‘stiff upper lip’ approach to dealing with mental distress to the system of support and compensation for US troops which has been noted not to encourage improvement as well as it might.

However, it’s also worth bearing in mind that part of the difference may be due to the experiences of the troops, and as far as I know, there is no research that has looked at whether your average US soldier in Iraq simply deals with more potentially traumatising events – combat, injured civilians, bombings and so on.

The article is a fantastic discussion of how the UK armed forces manage mental health but unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, because discussions about British army psychiatry can explode if not handled by professionals.
 

UPDATE: The authors of the paper, the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, have kindly put the full text of the article online which you can read as a pdf.

 

Link to locked article in Military Medicine.
Link to PubMed entry for article.

The 1911 Coca-Cola brain poison trial

The Psychologist has a fascinating article on how the world’s favourite tooth rot, Coca-Cola, was the subject of a 1911 court case brought by the US government who believed it damaged the brain.

Although curious enough in itself, the incident also launched the career of Harry Hollingworth – later one of the founders of advertising psychology – who was paid to create laboratory tests to see whether the soft drink really caused cognitive problems.

Hollingworth was only a graduate student at the time but took the money after better known psychologists wanted to avoid getting their hands dirty with corporate cash. Apparently, Hollingworth later wrote that “he accepted the offer from the Coca-Cola Company because at his young age he ‘had as yet, no sanctity to preserve’.”

The impetus behind the lawsuit was Harvey Washington Wiley, head of the Bureau of Chemistry of the US Department of Agriculture. Wiley had long been a vocal opponent of caffeine and was especially critical of its role in the popular beverage. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Coca-Cola Company marketed the beverage as ‘the ideal brain tonic’, emphasising the stimulant properties of the drink, noting in its advertising that it ‘invigorated the fatigued body and quickened the tired brain’. Wiley had testified before Congress that caffeine was a poison and a habit-forming drug. He was not fond of coffee or tea but was less critical of those drinks because the caffeine was an indigenous ingredient. But he opposed the sale of Coca-Cola on two grounds: the caffeine was an added ingredient, and the beverage was marketed to children.

As might be expected from a caffienated, sugar-packed drink, the sophisticated double-blind studies showed that people experienced a small boost in mental ability shortly after drinking it, although the case was thrown out for technical reasons.

Although Hollingworth didn’t continue doing drug-testing research, his experience of applying psychology to the corporate world undoubtedly opened the door to his future career in advertising.
 

Link to ‘Coca-Cola – Brain tonic or poison?’