New mental states for the 21st century

Writer Douglas Coupland has a playful article in the The Independent where he defines ‘new terms for new sensations’ and lists new psychological states that may be arising from 21st century life.

Coupland is known for his careful observations of how technology impacts on day-to-day living and there are many delightful entries in the list, but a few of my favourites are below:

Deselfing: Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the internet with as much information as possible.

Internal Voice Blindness: The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue.

Karaokeal Amnesia: Most people don’t know all the lyrics to almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear. (See also Lyrical Putty)

Lyrical Putty: The lyrics one creates in one’s head in the absence of knowing a song’s real lyrics.

Zoosumnial Blurring: The notion that animals probably don’t see much difference between dreaming and being awake.

 

Link to ‘New terms for new sensations’ in The Indepedent.

The strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion

An intriguing article has just been published in the journal Perception about a never-before-described visual illusion where your own reflection in the mirror seems to become distorted and shifts identity.

To trigger the illusion you need to stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room. The author, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, describes his set up which seems to reliably trigger the illusion: you need a room lit only by a dim lamp (he suggests a 25W bulb) that is placed behind the sitter, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front.

The participant just has to gaze at his or her reflected face within the mirror and usually “after less than a minute, the observer began to perceive the strange-face illusion”.

The set-up was tried out on 50 people, and the effects they describe are quite striking:

At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included: (a) huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); (b) a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; (c) an unknown person (28%); (d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); (e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); (f ) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).

Caputo suggests that the dramatic effects might be caused by a combination of basic visual distortions affecting the face-specific interpretation system.

The visual system starts to adapt after we receive the same information over time (this is why you can experience visual changes by staring at anything for a long time) but we also have a system that interprets faces very easily.

This is why we can ‘see’ faces in clouds, trees, or even from just two dots and a line. The brain is always ‘looking for faces’ and it is likely that we have a specialised face detection system to allow us to recognise individuals whose faces actually only differ a small amount in statistical terms from other people’s.

According to Caputo’s suggestion, the illusion might be caused by low level fluctuations in the stability of edges, shading and outlines affecting the perceived definition of the face, which gets over-interpreted as ‘someone else’ by the face recognition system.

More mysterious, however, were the participants’ emotional reactions to the changes:

The participants reported that apparition of new faces in the mirror caused sensations of otherness when the new face appeared to be that of another, unknown person or strange `other’ looking at him/her from within or beyond the mirror. All fifty participants experienced some form of this dissociative identity effect, at least for some apparition of strange faces and often reported strong emotional responses in these instances. For example, some observers felt that the `other’ watched them with an enigmatic expression – situation that they found astonishing. Some participants saw a malign expression on the ‘other’ face and became anxious. Other participants felt that the `other’ was smiling or cheerful, and experienced positive emotions in response. The apparition of deceased parents or of archetypal portraits produced feelings of silent query. Apparition of monstrous beings produced fear or disturbance. Dynamic deformations of new faces (like pulsations or shrinking, smiling or grinding) produced an overall sense of inquietude for things out of control.

If any Mind Hacks readers try the illusion out for themselves, I’d be fascinated to hear about your experiences in the comments.
 

Link to full-text of article.
Link to PubMed entry for study.

2010-09-17 Spike activity

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

There’s a fantastic discussion and video interview on America’s first prison for drug addicts, “the world’s most famous – and infamous – center for the treatment and study of drug addiction”, over at Neuroanthropology.

The Guardian has a piece by psychologist Susan Blackmore on why she’s changed her mind on the idea that religion works like a ‘meme virus’.

How political beliefs affect racial biases. Neuron Culture covers an intriguing study on how both liberals and conservatives show racial biases but in opposite directions in moral reasoning tasks.

Time has a beautiful gallery of photos depicting how different types of booze look under a microscope. Brings a whole a new meaning to the term ‘beer goggles’.

The paradoxes of pharmaco-psychiatry are discussed in excellent coverage from Neuroskeptic. If you read only one piece on mental health this week, make it this one.

The Globe and Mail discuss how popularity influences how infectious diseases spread, discussing new research showing that the cool kids get the flu first .

Why are women often chosen to lead organisations in a crisis? Fascinating counter-intuitive sex bias covered by the BPS Research Digest. Bonus dispiriting last paragraph.

Science News covers a study on how video games damage the… Sorry, my mistake, it’s another study on how action video games lead to generalisable cognitive benefits.

There’s another good piece on Evidence Based Mummy about how kids’ ability with numbers is strongly linked to how often their parents talk about numbers. I love the phrase ‘number talk’.

The New York Times publish a full-on retraction for an unrealistic story about how future Alzheimer’s could be detected with 100% accuracy. The Neuroshrink blog had called bullshit two weeks ago.

The ever-excellent forensic psychology blog In the News covers another academic attack on criminal profiling as “so vague as to be meaningless”.

Wired Science covers an interesting legal bias finding, for crimes of toxin exposure, more severe punishments are handed out for crimes with fewer victims.

I found an interesting video on YouTube where a self-identified face-taste synaesthete describes what tastes different famous faces evoke. No Shakira, but I suspect her face tastes like a choir of angels weeping gently on your tongue.

The LA Times on how endocrinologists are calling out two widely discussed conditions without a medical basis, ‘adrenal fatigue’ and ‘Wilson’s temperature fatigue’, as “internet diseases”. I suspect, without knowing what internet disease is slang for.

The Oxford English Dictionary now has a definition taken from Language Log immediately opening a recursion hole in the fabric of space and time.

University of Texas press release on a study finding that placebo improves ‘low sexual functioning’ in 1-in-3 women. “For more information, contact: Jessica Sinn”

A new study on how modern psychosurgery lifts mood in chronically depressed patients is covered by The Neurocritic.

The Sydney Morning Herald covers a study on how people who are better at introspection have structural differences in the anterior prefrontal cortex.

There’s a podcast discussion with neuroscience-inspired artist Garry Kennard over at The Beautiful Brain.

VBS.TV has a fantastic interview with Alexander Shulgin, psychedelic chemist and researcher extraordinaire.

There’s a fantastic piece on how we unintentionally ‘mirror’ other people’s speech patterns during conversation over at Sensory Superpowers.

BoingBoing interviews the Perez Hilton of Mexico’s drug war – the anonymous writer behind Blog De Narco.

There are 10 psychological insights into online dating taken from the scientific literature over at PsyBlog.

Discover Magazine has an opinion piece by tech psychologist Sherry Turkle on her vision for the near future of human society.

Can we all become delusional with hypnosis? Brief but good piece by philosopher Lisa Bortolotti on The Splintered Mind.

Seed Magazine has an intriguing piece on the psychoactive effects of food.

Perceptual and perceptive psychologist Mark Changizi guest posts on PLoS Blogs about a proposal for the ‘Red Club for Men’.

The first man with autism

The Atlantic has an amazing article about the first person ever diagnosed with autism, the now 77 year-old Donald Triplett, who plays a mean game of golf and seems to be doing just fine.

The piece tracks the history of both Triplett and our understanding of autism which has changed radically since the diagnosis was first used in the 1940s.

However, it is Triplett’s life story which really bring the article alive.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Donald’s life is that he grew up to be an avid traveler. He has been to Germany, Tunisia, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia—some 36 foreign countries and 28 U.S. states in all, including Egypt three times, Istanbul five times, and Hawaii 17. He’s notched one African safari, several cruises, and innumerable PGA tournaments.

It’s not wanderlust exactly. Most times, he sets six days as his maximum time away, and maintains no contact afterward with people he meets along the way. He makes it a mission to get his own snapshots of places he’s already seen in pictures, and assembles them into albums when he gets home. Then he gets to work planning his next foray, calling the airlines himself for domestic travel, and relying on a travel agent in Jackson when he’s going overseas. He is, in all likelihood, the best-traveled man in Forest, Mississippi.

This is the same man whose favorite pastimes, as a boy, were spinning objects, spinning himself, and rolling nonsense words around in his mouth.

 

Link to The Atlantic on ‘Autism’s First Child’.

Once and future gayness

Never one to avoid opening Pandora’s box, Bering in Mind has an excellent discussion on whether it’s possible to predict adult sexual orientation from childhood traits and behaviours.

As the article notes, there are a host of heated debates about the merits of trying to ‘predict homosexuality’ but even as a purely scientific question, it turns out to be challenging research.

For the most accurate data, prospective studies – where you see how people change over time – are ideal, but unfortunately they are difficult to implement for both social and practical reasons:

Conducting prospective studies of this sort is not terribly practical, explain Bailey and Zucker, for several reasons. First, given that only about 10 percent of the population is homosexual, a rather large number of prehomosexuals are needed to obtain a sufficient sample size of eventually gay adults, and this would require a huge oversampling of children just in case some turn out gay. Second, a longitudinal study tracking the sexuality of children into late adolescence takes a long time—around sixteen years—so the prospective approach is very slow-going. Finally, and perhaps the biggest problem with prospective homosexuality studies, not a lot of parents are likely to volunteer their children. Rightly or wrongly, this is a sensitive topic, and usually it’s only children who present significant sex-atypical behaviors—such as those with gender identity disorder—that are brought into clinics and whose cases are made available to researchers.

The article discusses the various methods researchers have used to try and uncover whether there are any childhood characteristics typical of adults who later turn out to be gay, including interviews with friends and family and analysing home videos.

While the data is, to be fair, a bit ropey, there is evidence to suggest that non-gender typical behaviour is more common, but it is unlikely that this alone is a reliable guide to future homosexuality.

Needless to say, the whole area is fraught with ethical and political debates but the Bering in Mind article is a great wide-ranging introduction to this little discussed topic.
 

Link to Bering in Mind on ‘forecasting adult sexual orientation’.

An uneven hail of bullets

Gunshot wounds to the head are a major cause of death among soldiers in combat but little is known about where bullets are more likely to impact. A study just published in the Journal of Trauma looked at common bullet entry points among soldiers who died in combat and found clear patterns – but the researchers are not sure why.

The study, led by physician Yuval Ran, looked at Israeli combat deaths from 2000 to 2004 and tracked where bullet entries appeared on the skull (illustrated above), finding that the lower back (occipital region) and front of the temple areas (anterior-temporal regions) were most likely.

The results of our study show that in a combat setting, the occipital and anterior-temporal regions are most frequently hit, as opposed to the anterior-parietal and the posterior-temporal regions, which are rarely hit. Moreover, most of the parietal injuries were in proximity to the occipital bone. In an attempt to explain these findings, we presented them to sniper instructors, only to learn that snipers always aim to center mass, and aiming at high distances to different skull areas is not probable. At this time, we have no plausible theory to explain these findings.

Your first thought may be that the distribution is because helmets better protect certain parts of the head, but as the researchers note, helmets have been shown to be almost entirely ineffective in protecting against direct gunfire.

Getting shot in the head is not just an unfortunate event, it is the result of the interaction between the shooter and the target, and each of their behaviours could affect where bullets are more likely to land.

The researchers also note that the results are strikingly similar to the only other study looking at the location of fatal gunshot wounds to the head, despite the fact that this earlier study only included civilian shootings.

While there is no current theory as to why fatal gunshot wounds are more likely to be distributed as they are, the article suggests that this could be used to save lives in combat.

Effective helmets are not worn by soldiers because sufficient armouring would make them too heavy, but simply adding protective armour to the most common areas would make for a lighter helmet that could stop the majority of fatal bullet wounds.
 

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Touching the space between us

Slate has an excellent article on the psychology of collaborations that highlights the often underplayed role of the creative relationship and bemoans are obsession with the illusory ‘lone genius’.

The author is Joshua Wolf Shenk who you may recognise from one of the best psychology articles I’ve yet read – an Atlantic article on happiness and ageing – which we covered last year on Mind Hacks.

This new piece is part of a ongoing series that aims to pick up on our cultural neglect of the dynamic interaction between partners.

But a burgeoning field has shown that, from the very first days of life, relationships shape our experience, our character, even our biology. This research, which has flowered in the last ten years, took root in the 1970s. One reason, explains the psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, was the advent of the simple video camera. It allowed researchers to easily capture and analyze the exchanges between babies and their caregivers. In video of 4-month-olds with their mothers, for example, the two mimic each other’s facial expressions and amplify them. So, a baby’s grin elicits a mother’s smile, which leads the baby to a full-on expression of joy—round mouth, big eyes. This in turn affects the mother, and so on in a continuous exchange that entwines the pair.

I also really recommend an excellent interview with Shenk over at NeuroTribes where he covers a surprising amount of ground.

Rather fittingly, the interview is all the better for the interviewer and the interviewee effortlessly bouncing ideas off each other.
 

Link to Slate piece ‘Two Is the Magic Number’.
Link to NeuroTribes interview with Shenk.

How culture can invert genetic risk

Neuron Culture has a fantastic piece on how a long touted ‘depression gene’ turned out to reduce the risk of mood problems in people in East Asians and why we can’t always understand genetic effects on behaviour without understanding culture.

The piece riffs on the long-established finding that the short variant of the serotonin transporter or 5-HTTLPR gene is more common in people with depression, until psychologist Joan Chiao found that East Asians are more than twice as likely to have the gene but only have half the rate of mood problems.

Why is this the case? Probably because 5-HTTLPR isn’t so much a gene for depression, but more likely for social sensitivity, and East Asian culture is more likely to be collectivist, where social connections matter more in your psychological make-up:

So how does individualism-v-collectivism relate to depression and depression genes? Here Chiao and Blizinsky, as well as Way and Lieberman (these connections were apparently ripe) turned to another emerging idea: That the short SERT gene seems to sensitize people not just to bad experience, but to all experience, good or bad…

This starts to explain the purported interplay of the S/S allele and a collectivist culture: If short-SERT people get more out of social support, a more supportive culture could buffer them against depression, easing any selective pressure against the gene. Meanwhile the gene’s growing prevalence would make the culture increasingly supportive, since those who carry it might be more empathetic. Studies have shown, for instance, that short-SERT people more readily recognize and react to others’ emotional states.

For those who keep an eye on such things, Neuron Culture has just become part of the newly launched Wired Science blog network which is already full of great stuff.
 

Link to Neuron Culture on ‘The Depression Map’.

Twilight novels ‘could be altering the brain’

The Twilight series of young adult novels “could be affecting the dynamic workings of the teenage brain in ways scientists don’t yet understand” according to a bizarre article from LiveScience.

To be fair, the premise of the article is quite correct, Twilight novels (along with everything) are indeed altering the brain in ways we don’t understand, because the brain changes in response to any and every experience we have – plus, we don’t have omniscient powers of all-knowing.

The report has apparently been inspired by a recent conference just held in the UK called ‘The Emergent Mind: Adolescent Literature and Culture’ which, judging by the pdf of the programme, had nothing to say about the brain.

The literature researchers quoted in the article make some vague and unhelpful generalisations about neuroscience but it’s hard to say whether they were just speculating based on the reporter’s questions.

The result, however, is an Onion-esque ‘vampire novels are changing teen brains’ article. Perhaps its only redeeming feature is that it makes an ironic scare story about books that balances out the usual scare stories about technology.

All those misinformed parents who stopped their kids using the internet and made them read novels are likely kicking themselves now. This would be funnier, of course, if it wasn’t so likely.
 

Link to fiction-inspired LiveScience article (via @stevesilberman).

The death of ‘right brain thinking’

A new study published in Psychological Bulletin has just reviewed all the neuroscience research on creative thinking and found no good evidence for the pop-culture idea that the right side of the brain is more involved in ‘creative thinking’.

Sadly, the full text isn’t available online, but the abstract of the study contains all the punchlines:

A review of EEG, ERP, and neuroimaging studies of creativity and insight.

Psychol Bull. 2010 Sep;136(5):822-48.

Dietrich A, Kanso R.

Creativity is a cornerstone of what makes us human, yet the neural mechanisms underlying creative thinking are poorly understood. A recent surge of interest into the neural underpinnings of creative behavior has produced a banquet of data that is tantalizing but, considered as a whole, deeply self-contradictory. We review the emerging literature and take stock of several long-standing theories and widely held beliefs about creativity.

A total of 72 experiments, reported in 63 articles, make up the core of the review. They broadly fall into 3 categories: divergent thinking, artistic creativity, and insight. Electroencephalographic studies of divergent thinking yield highly variegated results. Neuroimaging studies of this paradigm also indicate no reliable changes above and beyond diffuse prefrontal activation. These findings call into question the usefulness of the divergent thinking construct in the search for the neural basis of creativity.

A similarly inconclusive picture emerges for studies of artistic performance, except that this paradigm also often yields activation of motor and temporoparietal regions. Neuroelectric and imaging studies of insight are more consistent, reflecting changes in anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal areas.

Taken together, creative thinking does not appear to critically depend on any single mental process or brain region, and it is not especially associated with right brains, defocused attention, low arousal, or alpha synchronization, as sometimes hypothesized. To make creativity tractable in the brain, it must be further subdivided into different types that can be meaningfully associated with specific neurocognitive processes.

 

Link to PubMed entry for studies (via @sarcastic_f).

The baroque art rifle

Anthropologist Wade Davis’s wonderfully vivid description of the effects of Amazonian hallucinogenic plants from page 216 of his fantastic book, One River:

In the case of yagé, some twenty one admixtures have been identified to date. Two of these are of particular interest. Psychotria viridis is a shrub in the coffee family. Chagopranga is Diplopterys cabrerana, a forest liana closely related to yagé. Unlike yagé, both of these plants contain tryptamines, powerful psychoactive compounds that when smoked or snuffed induce a very rapid, intense intoxication of short duration marked by astonishing visual imagery.

The sensation is rather like being shot out of a barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.

 

Link to more information about One River.

Dopamine crystal method

A beautiful image of dopamine crystals viewed with polarized light.

Photo by Spike Walker for Wellcome Images. Click for source

From the description: “A polarized light micrograph of dopamine crystals. Dopamine is a naturally occurring precursor of norepinephrine that affects various brain processes, many of which control movements, emotional responses and the experiences of pain and pleasure. Dopamine receptors are especially clustered in the midbrain. The drug L-DOPA, used to help sufferers of Parkinson’s disease, is converted in the brain to dopamine.”
 

Link to Creative Commons licensed image at Wellcome (via NewSci).

Mind gene myths

The Guardian has an excellent article on why news stories touting a gene for a particular psychological trait, like intelligence, optimism or dyslexia, are usually misguided.

The piece is a fantastic potted guide to how science goes about untangling the effects of genes and the environment and how this applies to the increasingly popular attempt to link genetics to personality, thinking and behaviour.

What are the implications of all this for the stories we hear in the media about new genetic discoveries? The main message is that we need to be aware of the small effect of most individual genes on human traits. The idea that we can test for a single gene that causes musical talent, optimism or intelligence is just plain wrong. Even where reliable associations are found, they don’t correspond to the kind of major influences that we learned about in school biology. And we need to realise that twin studies, which consider the total effect of a person’s genetic makeup on a trait, often give very different results from molecular studies of individual genes.

Don’t be put off by the picture of Jedward. Not all twin studies are quite so gruesome.
 

Link to article on myth of ‘a gene for things like intelligence.’

2010-09-10 Spike activity

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

Neuroscience hip-hop. The Beautiful Brain discovers a new track from Prince Ea where he waxes lyrical about the cortex. The neurobiological microphonist discusses the track here.

The New York Times says to forget what you know about good study habits and discusses where the cognitive science of learning conflicts with teacherly advice.

The future of reading and how tweaking fonts could cause us to process text differently are discussed over at The Frontal Cortex. See also a piece riffing on the recent study on mobile phone half-a-logues.

BBC News has an in-depth article on cutting drugs and how the supply of adulterants to illicit dealers has become a big business in its own right.

Problem drug users are possibly the most stigmatised group of patients. Addiction Inbox looks at how drug policy needs to change to take these social obstacles into account.

Slate has an excellent analysis of ‘HauserGate‘ and why the drive for evidence can be a Siren’s call.

The first medical cannabis advert airs in the US, advertising cannabis for, er, just about any illness you can think of. Dosenation has the video.

NPR has a short radio piece on the top five things parents worry about and the genuine top five dangers to children. There is no overlap.

There’s a fantastic piece on the subtle reaping by carbon monoxide poisoning over at Speakeasy Science.

Wired Danger Room reports on the record number of US troops taking psychiatric medication.

If you read only one piece on oxytocin this week make it this great piece from Wonderland that looks at the differing effects of the hormone and male and female parents and skips the ‘hug drug’ stereotype.

The Guardian has a fantastic piece on the remarkably problem solving abilities of slime moulds. The B-movie version is in the works.

The excellent Providentia blog has a great piece on Thomas de Quincey “one of the high priests of the literary drug culture” – famous for his book ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’.

The Psychologist is looking for new voices and brand new talent for its pages. If you’ve not published much, or anything before, but have a passion for writing, this could be your chance.

The woman whose new memories are erased each night. The BPS Research Digest covers an intriguing and unusual form of amnesia.

BBC News has some fantastic coverage of the biomechanical analysis of attractive male dancing styles study. Although, according to the conclusions of the research, the funky chicken should be sexual dynamite.

A new meta-analysis debunks the link between psychopathy and violence and In the News has the low-down.

New Scientist has a lamentable article were they ask the head of the UK’s first and only private internet addiction clinic whether ‘internet addiction’ really exists. Next week, head of Eli Lilly asked which is the best pill to treat depression.

How the mind counteracts offensive ideas. Great review of how we mentally push back against things we don’t like.

All in the Mind from ABC Radio National discusses climate change and the psychology of mass behaviour change for the collective good.

There’s an interesting project developing at the History of Madness blog where they’re publishing the syllabus from a number of university courses on the history of psychiatry from around the world.

The New York Times has an in-depth article that asks can preschoolers be depressed?

A fascinating look at supposedly new slang like ‘gonna’ and ‘shoulda’ over at LanguageLog digs up the fact that they have a fine vintage in the English language.

Nature News has a feature article on the science of nurture and epigenetics.

Maximum amount of alcohol consumed in 24 hours by parents predicts mental health problems in teenagers. Another fascinating look at recent research by Evidence Based Mummy.

The New York Times Opinionator blog has a piece introducing the concept of ‘experimental philosophy’.

The latest edition of the American Psychological Association’s Monitor magazine is online and open.

Newsweek discusses the many facets of alcoholism and why abstinence isn’t always the only solution.

The environmental influence on the heredity of intelligence is discussed over at Spiegel which is one of the few mainstream articles that seems to get the idea that genetic influence isn’t fixed.

The Washington Post discusses the popularity of hallucinogenic ayahuasca ceremonies for Peruvian tourists.

Britney Spears’ tongue. As LanguageLog notes “It’s not very often that an observation about articulatory phonetics goes viral.” Exactly what I was thinking.

Beyond the call of duty

Oscillatory Thoughts has a brilliant post about the self-experimentation carried out by pioneering neurologist Henry Head in the early 1900s. This involved severing nerves to see which were responsible for areas of sensation and creating a thorough map of how sensory abilities differed across the body – and no spot was left untested.

The post has a fantastic description of a 1908 study on how somatosensation recovered after… ok, ok, here’s where he dips his cock in hot water:

In the case of [Henry Head], the tip happens to be devoid of heat-spots but is sensitive to cold and to pain. When… it was dipped into water at 40° C, no sensation of heat was produced, but [Head] experienced an unusually disagreeable sensation of pain… But, as soon as the water covered the corona without reaching the foreskin, both cold and pain disappeared, giving place to an exquisitely pleasant sensation of heat.

Science. Happy now?
 

Link to Oscillatory Thoughts on Head’s self-experimentation.
Link to excellent Wikipedia article on Henry Head.