Concerned from Tunbridge Wells

The Guardian has been running a fun evolutionary psychology agony aunt column that’s been tackling questions such as ‘why do I fancy blonde women?’, ‘why do nice girls fall for bad boys?’ and ‘what can I do to stop my best friend marrying this idiot?’.

Despite it’s potential, evolutionary psychology has a tendancy to be a bit over-enthusiastic at times but the column just discusses the published studies in relation to the readers’ questions and turns out to be a concise guide to some of the field’s thinking on the area.

Clearly it’s not meant to be taken too seriously as an advice column but any agony aunt that gives references for her evolutionary advice is alright by me.

Link to Guardian’s ‘Ask Carole’ column (via @researchdigest)

An unwanted key to a devastating condition

The New York Times has a gripping article and video report about how a family in Colombia may be the key to unlocking the neuroscience of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most devastating forms of degenerative brain disease that can strike as early as the 30s or 40s.

Alzheimer’s disease is a form of dementia, meaning that the mind and brain decline quicker than would be expected through normal ageing, but usually it is a condition of the old.

Most dementias are not thought to have one specific cause and are put down to a lifetime’s ‘wear and tear’ combined with different levels of risk from a number of genes.

In contrast, there are some forms of dementias, known as early onset dementias, that typically strike in middle-age and are much more likely to be due to mutations in single genes or mutations in only a handful of genes.

While we understand the genetics of these conditions quite well these days, it is still not understood why they cause the terminal and rapid decline of the brain.

The New York Times article discusses research from my own university, the Universidad de Antioquia, because one family in the Antioquia region of Colombia has the highest known rate of early-onset dementia in the world.

Genetically, the Antioquia region is very interesting and is known as a ‘population isolate’ because there has been very little influence on the gene pool from outside the region for about two centuries, largely due to the imposing mountains for which the area is famous.

The population originates with settlers from the Basque region of Spain who intermarried with native people (interestingly, almost entirely Spanish men with native women) while subsequent generations largely intermarried with each other. A recent study of the region shows very little change in genetic variation across the region and little change in common surnames for 200 years.

In effect, the region is like a giant ‘petri dish’ for population genetics and this means it is a lot easier to link genetic influences to specific disorders of the mind and brain. The New York Times piece features the work from the neuroscience department while my department, psychiatry, have completed much work on the genetics of bipolar disorder for the same reason.

The article describes both the potential of the research and the challenges of working in the region and is a fantastic account both for its scientific content and its humane approach to the issue. If you do nothing else, however, watch the short video report which is a powerful piece of scientific film-making.

Link to NYT piece ‘Alzheimer‚Äôs Stalks a Colombian Family’.

Tripping in a PET scanner

The History of the Human Sciences journal covers the problem of psychedelic drug research and subjective experience. The article argues that the mind-bending nature of the drugs demand that scientists deal with the clash between the objective world view of science and the subjective experience of the participant that is often swept under the carpet in other areas of substance research.

One particular gem is where it has a report from a participant who describes his or her experience being PET brain scanned while tripping on psilocybin:

At the beginning of the trip I suddenly felt an urge to lie down in the lab. At that point, the optical ‘distortion’ began. First, I saw that some structures were moving and took up different colors and forms. From the gurney, I looked at the sink and the soap dispenser on the wall. All of a sudden, they looked as if they had been painted – as if you apply a filter to an image, which makes it look like an oil painting.

Before the scan, I went to the toilet, but I didn’t find my bearings there. All proportions were wrong: the toilet seemed to be huge, my hands were too big, the arms too long. The first minutes of the scan were also strange. When I realized the scientist in the corner of my eye, he looked like a rat, and the assistant’s face was a zombie-like grimace. As soon as I closed my eyes, my perception changed abruptly and totally.

I was gliding through bizarre geometric spaces, mostly cubic and intensively red. My field of vision was enormously wide, up to 270º, at the corners of which I perceived whispering human figures. Only with great effort, could I afterwards fill in the questionnaires. The answers did not seem suitable or too undifferentiated. Sometimes I did not understand the questions. But it was fascinating that I could read at least half of the questions on a page at the same time.

It’s a fascinating paper as it is based on fieldwork by medical anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz in a laboratory where neuroscientists are studying the effects of psychedelic substances.

It explores how the researchers’ personal experience of the drugs informs their experimental designs and hence requires them to deal with the link between subjective experience and empirical science.

For example, in one part, while piloting EEG research, a researcher has a ‘bad trip’ and the team realise they need to make the lab look more friendly and display warmer and more relaxing pictures to reduce the chances of negative reactions.

This is clearly equivalent to the well-known context effects of set and setting developed by 60s acid-heads, but obviously has a feed-back effect on the empirical science.

As there is no ‘correct’ set-up for the look of the lab but it will clearly affect the objectively recorded results, there is an interesting interplay between objectivity and personal experience.

Obviously, this happens in other settings but is typically ignored, owing to the fact that the outcomes are perhaps less dramatic, but the amplifying nature of psychedelics demands a response from the researchers.

Sadly, the article is locked behind a $25 dollar paywall so if you want to read the full text be prepared to give up the best part of a year’s subscription to Playboy. Bargain.

Link to DOI and summary of academic article.

Pointing the finger

Photo by Flickr user Adam Crowe. Click for sourceA brief yet intriguing description of a talk on pointing, by the ever versatile neuroscientist and philosopher Ray Tallis at the recent Hay Literary Festival.

A spellbinding hour with philosopher and self-confessed “many-layered anorak” Raymond Tallis on the subject of pointing. Yes, sticking your finger in the air and directing it at an object. It is, he argued, one of the attributes that mark us out as human beings with a sense of ourselves and others in a shared space: no other animal, including pointers and chimps, can use pointing fully. He reflected on its use for babies as a staging post towards acquiring language; and noted that in autistic children there is often an absence of pointing. He talked about pointing and power: the pointing that marks some unfortunate from a crowd and summons them to who-knows-what; the Malcolm Tucker-esque jabbing of the air that is tantamount to “a one-fingered punching at the self”. Then there is the disembodied, absent, generalised pointing of the fingerpost, which has “the ghost of intention about it”.

Link to description in The Guardian (via @Matthew_Broome)

The memory manipulators

Photo by Flickr user Andrew Mason. Click for sourceSlate has just finished an awesome eight-part special on how memory can be manipulated, shaped and reshaped even when we’re completely unaware of it.

The series is really a retrospective on the life and work of Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most important and influential researchers in the area of false and flexible memories.

The first part is description of an online memory experiment completed by the website. If you’re new to the area it’s worth checking out, but if you’re aware of how easy it is for people to say they’ve genuinely remembered false events, it may be worth skipping to part two where the series really kicks off.

The articles weave together Loftus’ life and scientific work, describing how her own experiences have shaped her interest in false memory and how she has applied her interest in the flexibility of memory to a remarkably wide range of fields.

She is probably best known for her research which countered much of the ‘recovered memories of abuse’ hysteria which arose in the 90s. Loftus demonstrated it was very easy for therapists to encourage false memories in their clients.

This is a wonderfully vivid passage that describes how she developed her early experiments that ‘implanted’ nondescript false memories (such as the experience of being lost in the mall) to more unusual scenarios:

So Loftus ran bolder experiments with more subjects, more trauma, and greater implausibility. She convinced people that they had nearly choked, had caught their parents having sex, or had seen a wounded animal after a bombing. Other researchers planted memories of nearly drowning, being hospitalized overnight, and being attacked by an animal. In one study, Loftus and her collaborators persuaded 18 percent of people that they had probably witnessed demonic possession.

Critics protested that Loftus still hadn’t proved the memories were fake. So she raised the ante. She persuaded 16 percent of a study population that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. In a follow-up experiment, researchers sold the same memory to 36 percent of subjects. This was impossible, since Bugs belonged to Warner Bros., not Disney. When critics complained that the Bugs memory wasn’t abusive, Loftus obliged them again. Her team convinced 30 percent of another group of subjects that on a visit to Disneyland, a drug-addled Pluto character had licked their ears.

The ‘recovered memories of abuse’ hysteria reached its peak with recovered memories of ‘satanic ritual abuse’ or SRA in which both the law and professionals got caught up in despite the fact that no reliable evidence was ever found for its existence.

It is now a matter of embarrassment not least due to several high profile cases, such as the Orkney scandal, where children were removed from their families owing to leading interviews and over-zealous social workers.

However, the ‘ritual abuse’ movement is not completely dead. In fact, only last year London’s John Bowlby Centre ran a conference on ‘Ritual Abuse and Mind Control’ (programme: pdf) which featured Valerie Sinason, author of the book ‘Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse’, which was partly responsible for fuelling the panic.

The Slate series covers some of the most important research to show how people could come to believe they were involved in such incidents and has many extras and links to other resources and the original research.

Link to Slate’s false memory series.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional writer for Slate

Disease rankings

There is a hierarchy of prestige in medicine. Numerous studies have found that surgery and internal medicine are thought of most highly by doctors while while psychiatry, geriatric and child medicine come near the bottom. A study published in Social Science & Medicine took this idea one step further and looked at which diseases have the most prestige among the medical community.

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a highly influential book about the social dynamics of stigma in which he suggested that it has its social power through associating people with stereotypes.

It’s interesting that doctors who specialise in working with people who have the least status in society (children, the ‘mad’, the ‘old’) also have the least status in medicine.

The Norwegian researchers asked senior doctors, general practitioners and medical students to rate diseases and came up with the following list, which ranks diseases from the most prestigious at the top, to the least prestigious at the bottom.

Needless to say, mental illnesses fill most of the bottom slots.

Myocardial infarction [heart attack]
Leukaemia
Spleen rupture
Brain tumour
Testicle cancer
Pulmonary embolism [normally blood clot on the lung]
Angina pectoris
Extrauterine pregnancy
Thyroid cancer
Meniscus rupture [‘torn cartilage’]
Colon cancer
Ovarian cancer
Kidney stone
Appendicitis
Ulcerative colitis [inflammation of the bowel]
Kidney failure
Cataract
Duodenal ulcer [peptic ulcer]
Asthma
Pancreas cancer
Ankle fracture
Lung cancer
Sciatica [‘trapped nerve’]
Bechterew’s disease [arthritis of the spine]
Femoral neck fracture
Multiple sclerosis
Arthritis
Inguinal hernia [abdominal wall hernia]
Apoplexy [internal organ bleeding]
Psoriasis
Cerebral palsy
AIDS
Anorexia
Schizophrenia
Depressive neurosis
Hepatocirrhosis [cirrhosis of the liver]
Anxiety neurosis
Fibromyalgia

Link to PubMed entry for study.

On the edge of a nervous breakdown

Photo by Amparo Torres. Flick for sourceThe New York Times has an excellent article on the history of the ‘nervous breakdown’ – an inexact term that has never been officially recognised but which has been popular for over a century.

The article suggests that the phrase is common precisely because it sounds medical and, hence, significant, but remains vague enough to be used flexibly and by everybody without seeming pretentious.

The vagueness of the phrase made it impossible to survey the prevalence of any specific mental problem: It could mean anything from depression to mania or drunkenness; it might be the cause of a bitter divorce or the result of a split. And glossing over those details left people who suffered from what are now well-known afflictions, like postpartum depression, entirely in the dark, wondering if they were alone in their misery.

But that same imprecision allowed the speaker, not medical professionals, to control its meaning. People might be on the verge of, or close to, a nervous breakdown; and it was common enough to have had “something like” a nervous breakdown, or a mild one. The phrase allowed a person to disclose as much, or as little, detail about a “crackup” as he or she saw fit. Vagueness preserves privacy.

As the article notes, we have a long history of vague ’emotional exhaustion’ coveralls stretching from neurasthenia to burnout syndrome that come in and out of fashion.

Link to NYT On the Verge of ‘Vital Exhaustion’?

A brief and incomplete history of telepathy science

Photo from Wikipedia. Click for sourceThe Fortean Times has a wonderful article that discusses the long and winding quest to find scientific evidence for telepathy, extra-sensory perception and other mysterious psychic powers.

The opening paragraph both made me laugh out loud and sets the scene for the rest of the article:

There are two truths universally acknowledged about extra-sensory perception (ESP). The first is that the anecdotal evidence is often fun and fascinating to read, whereas to peruse the experimental evidence is as boring as batshit, as our antipodean cousins say, and the investigative methods generally employed would for most of us banish insomnia for all time. We can’t avoid discussing these methods and their results in these entries, but we do promise to be brief and to strive personfully not to ruin your reading experience.

Link to Fortean Times on ‘Telepathy on Trial’.

Psychopath researcher threatens to sue critics

Photo by Flickr user Profound Whatever. Click for sourceRobert Hare is a psychologist who studies psychopaths and is best known for developing the ‘Hare Psychopathy Checklist’ or PCL-R, a standard diagnostic tool for assessing offenders. He is currently threatening to sue two psychologists who wrote an article critical of the theory underlying the checklist, as well as the academic journal, Psychologist Assessment, that accepted the piece for publication after it was peer-reviewed.

There’s an account of the affair over at the excellent forensic psychology blog, In the News, who note that the article was authored by respected researchers Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke and was titled “Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate”. As a result of the legal threat the article has never come to light.

The letter from Hare’s lawyers apparently claimed that the he would:

“have no choice but to seek financial damages from your publication and from the authors of the article, as well as a public retraction of the article” if it was published. The letter claimed that Skeem and Cooke’s paper was “fraught with misrepresentations and other problems and a completely inaccurate summary of what amounts to [Hare’s] life’s work” and “deliberately fabricated or altered quotes of Dr. Hare, and substantially altered the sense of what Dr. Hare said in his previous publications.”

It’s probably worth noting that the PCL-R is big business. At current prices, each assessor who uses the checklist needs their own copy of the manual ($123) and the rating booklet ($68.50) and each individual assessment requires an interview guide at $5 each and a scoring form at about $3 each.

However, to use the assessment, each person needs to attend a training workshop at about $350 per person and workshops can easily involve 100 people at a time. Additionally, there is a follow-up correspondence course, price unspecified.

Because the assessments are used in the legal system, it is important that no-one (like an opposing lawyer in court) can find fault in the process and attending the ‘official’ training from the PCL-R company is considered the gold standard.

Recently, the affair has caught the attention of two lawyers and legal scholars who have just published their own analysis of the situation in the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health.

They express regret that Hare has chosen to use legal threats to counter his critics rather than to refute any points he felt were unfair in print himself, but also note that his strategy may actually undermine the usefulness of the PCL-R in court as opposing lawyers “may attempt to discredit that testimony by arguing that the literature relevant to evaluating the PCL-R has been tainted”.

Link to In the News on the case.

French government begins ‘neuropolicy’

Photo by Flickr user paul goyette. Click for sourceABC Radio National’s Life Matters covers the surprising news that France has created a brain and behavioural research unit specifically to form public policy.

The public policy in question is not just to do with the mind and brain and the director of the unit describes a ‘neuromarketing’ approach where the programme seems set to advise on how, for example, anti-smoking messages can be formulated.

As we’ve discussed several times, the ‘neuro’ of ‘neuromarketing’ is an interesting research focus but as an applied science it is completely premature and can currently tell us nothing about how best to appeal to the public that standard psychology can’t do already.

Rather worringly, unit director Olivier Oullier seems to think that ‘neuroscience’ and ‘neuroimaging’ allows access to unconscious and emotional responses that aren’t available to established behavioural research.

This is clearly crap and anyone who is aware of how neuroimaging studies are created knows that they rest on the quality of the psychological science.

It is also the case that not a single ‘neuromarketing’ study has shown a way to predict consumer responses, attitudes or preferences that improves on previously established cognitive science.

Psychology can be, and is, used to inform and evaluate public information campaigns and the effectiveness of public policy but at the current time brain scans are nothing but fairly lights.

UPDATE: Olivier Oullier got in touch to note that his interview was sparked by the release of a (very good) report [pdf] on ‘Improving public health prevention with behavioural, cognitive and neuroscience’. We’ve agreed to disagree on the value of neuroimaging in public policy right now, but he notes he’s actually a lot more measured in his analysis than you might of thought from my comments above.

Link to Life Matters on ‘Neuroscience and public policy’.

Mouse ache

Nature Neuroscience are about to publish a study that attempts to explain the biological basis of mouse acupuncture. If you’re checking in case you have accidentally slipped between universes, don’t worry, you haven’t. It’s just that this one has gone a bit strange.

The full paper is not out until later today and will eventually appear here, so I will reserve my full judgement (because, you never know, mouse acupuncture might be the next cure for cancer) but Not Exactly Rocket Science has read the paper and has a report of the bizarre study.

Apparently, it attempts to show a ‘biological basis’ for acupuncture by putting needles into mice at ‘traditional acupuncture points’ and then looks at the biochemical effects, particularly the release of a chemical called adenosine and riffs on the apparent ‘pain relieving effects’ from there.

The trouble is, no-one has reliably shown that acupuncture is more effective than placebo, and secondly, the Nature Neuroscience study itself apparently had no control condition, so you can’t even tell whether the effect in this study was specifically due to ‘acupuncture’ or not.

Just in case Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science has got it completely wrong, I’ll have whatever he’s smoking, and if he hasn’t, I’ll have whatever they’re smoking in the Nature Neuroscience office.

Link to Not Exactly Rocket Science coverage.
Link where paper will eventually appear.

A scientific foil to your accidental brain injury

Inkling Magazine has a fantastic article detailing unusual objects which have accidentally ended up in the brain and have subsequently made the pages of medical journals as surprising case reports.

It covers everything from fairly lights to stiletto heels to human teeth and is cheekily titled ‘Not Right in the Head’. The article also mentions that the Neurophilosophy blog published a similar article two years ago, but rather surprisingly there was only one case that overlapped between the two.

The moral of the story is that if you can imagine it ending up in the brain, it probably has at some stage.

However, neither article mentions my all time favourite case, which involved a miniature fencing foil being lodged in the brain after being accidentally shoved through the nostrils (see a previous Mind Hacks post on things that have become stuck in the brain through the nose).

It was first reported in a 1968 article for the journal Neuropsychologia and just gives the following details:

N.A. (born July 9, 1938), a young American airman, was injured on December 15, 1960, while stationed at the Azores. The injury resulted from a mock duel with another serviceman, when a miniature fencing foil entered the patient’s right nostril and punctured the base of the brain, after taking an obliquely upward course, slightly to the left.

The case is not only notable for its strangeness, however, it is also one of the most important cases in the neuropsychology of memory.

NA suffered a dense amnesia, not unlike the famous Patient HM, without experiencing any other cognitive problems and while retaining his exceptional intelligence.

A major difference with HM was that HM had his hippocampi and surrounding tissue surgically removed on both sides while NA had a much smaller penetrating injury that largely affected his thalamus and a nearby pathway called the mammillothalamic tract – deep brain structures known to be widely connected to the brain’s outer cortical areas.

This was some of the first evidence that amnesia could be caused by damage to a ‘memory circuit’ and hence this type of conscious ‘declarative’ memory did not solely rely on the hippocampi, as was thought by some after the studies on HM.

We now know that damage to a circuit involving the hippocampus, fornix, mammillary bodies, the dorsalmedial nucleus of the thalamus and to a lesser extent, the septal nuclei, can cause strikingly similar amnesic problems and, hence, have been identified as key memory areas.

NA subsequently became one of the most studied patients in neuropsychology but because ‘NA’ is such a nondescript search term, in the age of the internet it has become easier to find studies on him by searching for “miniature fencing foil”.

A curious epitaph for such an important figure in our understanding of the brain.

Link to Inkling Magazine on unusual objects in the brain.
Link to Neurophilosophy on unusual penetrating brain injuries.

An explosion of visual hysteria

I’ve written an article for the magazine fotografya about how photography was initially used by doctors to document ‘hysteria’ in the 19th century but quickly became a vector through which the condition was spread.

The most influential photos came from the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where, under the direction of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, hysteria was redefined to mean the appearance of apparently neurological symptoms, like paralysis or epileptic-like movements, without any clear damage to the nervous system.

Harnessed due to its presumed ability to objectively record the symptoms of patients, the camera became a vector for the condition, causing doctors to diagnose it in far greater numbers and for patients to express their distress through ‘hysterical’ symptoms in increasing numbers. We tend to think of media fashions as transient and frivolous but we forget that popular culture is as much an influence on illness and its treatment as science itself. For many, Charcot’s iconic pictures became the public expression of their private anguish and their documentary potential extended beyond the hospital walls to capture the broken spirit of the times.

These conditions are now known diagnosed as ‘conversion disorder‘ or considered to be ‘psychogenic’ in nature because psychological factors are thought to be behind the symptoms rather than what they appear to be – namely brain damage.

This means that the conditions are more likely to appear in people who already have experience of them, so early depictions of them were part of the process that led to an explosion in their appearance and diagnosis.

fotografya is a Turkish magazine and it has my original in English but I recommend checking out the Turkish translation as it is wonderfully illustrated by some of the striking photos of the time.

The article traces the history of ‘photographing madness’ from its clinical origins to its place in 19th century pop culture.

Link to article ‘Studio Charcot’ in English.
Link to Turkish translation with awesome illustrations.

2010-05-28 Spike activity

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

Decorative illustrations of women scientists improves girls’ test scores on a chemistry test, according to research covered by Big Think.

The Philosopher’s Zone from ABC Radio National had a great discussion of Nietzsche and his idea of the ‘will to power’.

fMRI in 1000 words. An excellent piece from Neuroskeptic discusses the technology behind the popular neuroimaging technique, minus the analysis.

All in the Mind (the BBC version) has just started a new series. Still a little bit starched but (at bloody last) available as a podcast.

Spanish paper El País has a barnstorming piece on El mito de la adicción a Internet [The myth of internet addiction] which kindly quotes me.

The BPS Research Digest has a fascinating piece on how men with brown eyes perceived as more dominant but not because their eyes are brown.

A history of the ‘ultra pure heroin flooding the streets’ scare story. A brief but revealing article in Slate.

Neuron Culture has a wonderfully eclectic link shower featuring mechanical brides, lie detectors, enemies and risk taking.

The author of Drugstore Cowboy has just been arrested again, aged 73, for robbing drugstores, reports The New York Times.

Neurophilosophy covers a lovely study finding that watching forward or back computer motion directs idle thoughts to the future or past.

Does age mediate susceptibility to cognitive biases? asks Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Wired discusses Aperger’s, institutionalisation and ex-hacker Adrian Lamo.

Remember the two teenagers who died after reportedly taking now-banned ‘legal high’ mephedrone? BBC News reports on toxicology tests that found no such drug in their bodies. Another triumph for media-driven drugs policies.

The Globe and Mail reports on research investigating the brain effects of poverty, although doesn’t delve too deep into which aspects of poverty may be having the effects.

The late Syd Barrett of psychedelic pioneers Pink Floyd warrants a short article in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Science News reports on research finding that a version of gene 5-HTT makes children more vulnerable to the effect of bullying.

Leading psychiatrist Peter Tyrer slams the UK governments Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder programme, reports The Guardian. There is some defence of the scheme in The Psychologist.

In The News has an excellent analysis of US laws aimed at marking out sex offenders and their unintended side-effects.

Cynthia Pomerleau, author of Why Women Smoke is interviewed on the excellent Addiction Inbox.

Wired Science reports that a shot of testosterone makes people more suspicious of each other.

Racial bias weakens our ability to feel someone else’s pain, according to research covered by Not Exactly Rocket Science.

BBC News reports on a study finding that prescribing heroin to long-term relapsing heroin addicts gives them a better chance of kicking the habit.

Airport psych security: snake oil on a plane?

Nature has an extensive article on the ‘deception detection training’ that’s been widely rolled out for airport security staff and anti-terrorism police despite that fact that is has barely been publicly tested.

As we reported in 2007, a great deal of this training seems to be based on psychologist Paul Ekman’s various methods for focusing on facial expressions as a way of improving the ability to detect lies.

However, there is no convincing evidence that has been published in peer-reviewed journals to suggest it can actually improve the ability to pick up deception.

The actual technique, at least as used by the United States, is called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques or SPOT, and was apparently created ‘in consultation’ with Ekman.

The Nature piece also discusses another technology Future Attribute Screening Technology or FAST, which essentially just looks to see if someone is stressed, with the idea that it can pick out potential terrorists, again with no public data available on its effectiveness.

Now, it could be that there are a great deal of classified test results that show how accurate these systems are, but if not, I suspect that physiological threat detection has barely moved on for 50 years and entirely relies on whether someone ‘looks shifty’ and is demonstrably stressed, probably back up with a bit of statistical modelling to sort through passenger characteristics.

However, the Nature article does a fantastic job of questioning the basis of the current technologies and asking to what extent they are high-tech snake oil.

Link to Nature ‘Airport security: Intent to deceive?’.

Welcome to PsyOps Air

Wired’s Danger Room blog took a trip on Commando Solo, the US Air Force plane that’s been specially modified for the Psychological Operations or PsyOps division to create instant radio and television stations to broadcast persuasive messages to the people below.

As you might expect, the article doesn’t reveal a huge amount and there’s lots of close angle photos that look like the sort of thing a military aviation perv might take on the subway.

However, it does reveal a little about what it’s like to work in the mobile studio and it does mention the difficulty with measuring impact of their work – a constant point of contention with PsyOps work.

Measuring the effectiveness of a bomber or a strike fighter is fairly straightforward: The art of bomb damage assessment, measuring the size of a bomb crater or effective blast radius of airdropped weapons. What about when your weapon is a television or radio signal, and your goal is the somewhat more nebulous aim of “influencing” a target?

“The biggest challenge is measuring our effectiveness,” said Rice. “We don’t have a way to look at it — we don’t have BDA.

Link to Danger Room ‘Inside the Air Force‚Äôs Secret PsyOps Plane’.