Author: vaughan

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.

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 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/may/26/dangerous-killers-200m-plan-waste”>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.

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 is 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?’.

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’s Secret PsyOps Plane’.

In the 1950s, three delusional Messiahs were gathered to live together in the same mental hospital. This is one of the most remarkable experiments in the history of psychology and I’ve written about it in an article for Slate.

I’ve had this tale told to me many times, but in a hazy way almost like a myth. I’ve been asked it as a question (“what would happen if three delusional Christs met each other?”) other times it appears as a trite abbreviate anecdote (“did you hear about the three delusional Christs? One decided he was the Father, the other the Son and the other the Holy Ghost!”).

It was, however, a genuine experiment, carried out by psychologist Milton Rokeach in the 1950s, and written up in the sadly out-of-print book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

As Rokeach realised years later, the whole setup was entirely unethical and thankfully we have moved beyond manipulating patients’ lives for academic curiosity, but it remains a fascinating chapter in psychiatric history and I tried to capture the essence of it in the Slate piece.

These tales are surprising because delusions, in the medical sense, are not simply a case of being mistaken. They are considered to be pathological beliefs, reflecting a warped or broken understanding that is not, by definition, amenable to being reshaped by reality. One of most striking examples is the Cotard delusion, under which a patient believes she is dead; surely there can be no clearer demonstration that simple and constant contradiction offers no lasting remedy. Rokeach, aware of this, did not expect a miraculous cure. Instead, he was drawing a parallel between the baseless nature of delusion and the flimsy foundations we use to construct our own identities. If tomorrow everyone treats me as if I have an electronic device in my head, there are ways and means I could use to demonstrate they are wrong and establish the facts of the matter—a visit to the hospital perhaps. But what if everyone treats me as if my core self were fundamentally different than I believed it to be? Let’s say they thought I was an undercover agent—what could I show them to prove otherwise? From my perspective, the best evidence is the strength of my conviction. My belief is my identity.

Link to Slate article ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’.

There’s a common belief that the weather affects our mood, that we tend to become more depressed in the winter and that summer brings an emotional lift. This has been researched before in small studies that have found inconsistent results but a new study published in Psychiatry Research tested the idea on almost 14,500 people and found no link to weather, while the seasonal effects did not follow the common belief: depression was more common in summer and autumn.

The researchers, led by Dutch psychologist Marcus Huibers, tested both the effect of daily changes in weather and the influence of the season. They sent out thousands of invitations to to people in Holland to complete a standard depression diagnosis questionnaire on the internet, in waves of a few thousand every week, over 18 months.

This allowed the researchers to check the exact day’s weather against people’s mood states.

Neither that day’s temperature, the amount of sunshine or rainfall had any immediate effect on mood, and the seasonal changes were not what you’d expect from ‘common knowledge’: men had seasonal peaks of major depression and sad mood in the summer, while women had seasonal peaks in the autumn.

Although there are some people who do seem to have depression triggered when winter arrives (a condition diagnosed as ‘seasonal affective disorder’ or SAD) this link doesn’t seem to exist in the public as a whole.

I currently live in Medellín, a city without seasons, to the point where it is nicknamed as ‘the city of eternal spring’. The locals says it used to be possible to tell the difference between the rainy seasons and dry seasons but over the last few years it’s simply been impossible to make any distinctions.

Interestingly, this has an effect on how we assess people for dementia. One of the ‘orientation’ questions for the widely used ‘Mini-mental state examination’ or MMSE evaluation is ‘what season is it?’.

As no-one knows what season it is, the assessment has to be scored out of 29 rather than 30, or it has to be replaced with something ad-hoc like ‘what part of the day is it?’.

However, it would be also interesting to find out whether depression varies here by time of year to understand whether this effect is really to do with season, or perhaps to do with the significance of the date.

For example, self-harm and suicide has been found to vary more by significant public holidays than by time of year.

Link to PubMed entry for depression, weather and season study.

A 1999 article about ‘Mental disorder among the Incas in ancient Peru’ in the History of Psychiatry journal has a listing of mental illness recognised by the Inca empire.

The name on the left is in Ancient Quechua, the language of the Incas, and the translation is on the right.

Chayapu oncuy – Frenzy, madness
Chayapuy – Frenzy, madness
Chayapuyniyoc – Frenetic
Chayapuyok urek – Lunatic
Cupaypa yaucusccan – Possessed by the devil
Haucha utek – Furious fool
Llakiy – Addiction, sadness, anxiety
Manchay Ilakllay – Fear
Manchay utek – Furious fool
Muzpaycachak – Fool madman
Poqques – Innocent fool who knows nothing
Pputirayay huaccanayay vnccoy – Melancholy
Putirayay – Melancholy
Putiy – Sadness
Soncconnak – Fool without common sense
Utek chanak – Madman
Utek chanaynin – Insanity
Utek cay – Insanity
Utek – Fool or madman without common sense

Interestingly, the translation is only approximate, not because the original terms were necessarily hard to understand but because we no longer know the meaning of the Spanish words which they were translated into.

Apparently, the the conquistadores had their own vocabulary for mental disorder which has now been lost to time.

However, it seems the Ancient Incas not only had a complex classification system but they also had a wide range of psychoactive plants which they used to try and treat mental problems.

Clearly there are some conditions mentioned that we wouldn’t recognise today but as soon as someone on the DSM committee gets hold of the article you can assured they’ll be proposed for the next edition. Probably alongside an academic article telling us that the condition is poorly recognised and woefully under-diagnosed.

I discovered the article via the excellent Spanish-language psychiatry blog Desde El Manicomio which also comes highly recommended.

Link to PubMed entry for Inca article.
Link to Desde El Manicomio.

The Providentia psychology blog has been a consistently good read for as long as I can remember and if you’ve never checked it out a host of great articles have been posted online recently.

Just in May along there have been pieces on how a barking woman was declared unfit for trial, how the panic about ‘subliminal advertising’ started in the ’50s, why adolescents drink and whether the Spanish monarch Joanna the Mad was really mad.

It’s written by Toronto-based psychologist Romeo Vitelli and is well worth a visit.

Link to the Providentia blog.

When we think two events are causally related we perceive the time between them to be shorter. Although this is news to me, it turns out the ‘time compression’ effect has been well researched.

Several of the studies have found that when we view two events but believe the first causes the second, time between them seems have gone quicker than when we perceive exactly the same scenario but think the two events are not connected.

This is a summary of the effect from a recent study that investigated whether your beliefs about how one thing is causing another affected the amount of time compression:

How much time might have elapsed between the launch of an economic program and the emergence of an economy from recession, between joining a dating service and finding someone you want to marry, or between giving your child a tough lecture about trying harder in school and seeing an effect on his or her performance? Recent research has shown that people subjectively bind such cause–effect events in time and “compress” the time elapsed between them. Hence, for instance, if a parent believes that the tough lecture was the reason for an improvement in the child’s performance, the parent would estimate the interval [between the two] to be shorter. Several behavioral studies have established that people judge the time elapsed between pairs of historical events to be shorter when they perceive the events to be causally linked than when people do not perceive them to be so (Faro, Leclerc, & Hastie, 2005).

Similar effects occur on a shorter time scale. For example, in another study, when participants intentionally made a movement that appeared to cause a sound, they thought the events were closer together than when the two events occurred with no apparent causal connection

The new study helped explain the effect and showed that our beliefs about how we think one thing caused another are crucial to our experience of time.

It found that if people believe that cause and effect happened by a mechanical or physical process that was time limited the ‘time compression’ effect increased, whereas if it was an accumulative or ‘building up to a tipping point’ process, time didn’t seem so short.

Link to PubMed entry for time compression study.

I’ve just noticed a smattering of articles that have tackled the idea of the ‘crack baby’ which became popular during the worrying emergence of crack cocaine during the late 80s. It turns out that babies exposed to crack in the womb weren’t necessarily massively brain damaged tragedies as the stereotype had it, but the concept has remained with us.

This is despite the fact that we have solid research to show that while those exposed to cocaine in utero do show some differences from other kids, the effects are undesirable but actually quite small.

This is from The New York Times last year:

Cocaine slows fetal growth, and exposed infants tend to be born smaller than unexposed ones, with smaller heads. But as these children grow, brain and body size catch up.

At a scientific conference in November, Dr. Lester presented an analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine-exposed children — 4,419 in all, ranging in age from 4 to 13. The analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on I.Q. or language development. In the largest of the studies, I.Q. scores of exposed children averaged about 4 points lower at age 7 than those of unexposed children.

In tests that measure specific brain functions, there is evidence that cocaine-exposed children are more likely than others to have difficulty with tasks that require visual attention and “executive function” — the brain’s ability to set priorities and pay selective attention, enabling the child to focus on the task at hand.

Cocaine exposure may also increase the frequency of defiant behavior and poor conduct, according to Dr. Lester’s analysis. There is also some evidence that boys may be more vulnerable than girls to behavior problems.

But experts say these findings are quite subtle and hard to generalize. “Just because it is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it is a huge public health impact,” said Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician who is director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Family Center in Baltimore.

A piece from City Limits Monthly tracked how the myth arose. It’s probably the best account I’ve read of the cultural currents that promoted the concept to front page news and keep it afloat even today.

And just last month The Washington Post talked to some families of kids labelled as ‘crack babies’ now that they have grown up into adults finding that, well, many have done alright.

Link to NYT on ‘The Epidemic That Wasn’t’.
Link to great City Limits analysis (via @maiasz)
Link to WashPo piece (via @sunshinyday)

Rhode Island Medical News recently published an April fools article where the author joked about negative hallucinations, where someone didn’t see things that were really there, seemingly unaware that such hallucinations are in fact possible.

The article, which you can read online as a pdf, has various humorous references to jumping traffics lights or ignoring family members. But when I’m talking about the genuine version I don’t mean lapses of attention, blind spots, inattentional blindness or other momentary failure-to-notice effects. I’m talking about not seeing specific barn door obvious objects in your field of vision when you are concentrating on the area.

These are genuinely called negative hallucinations in the scientific literature although, as far as I know, they only occur in one specific context – after hypnosis.

In fact, the induction of a negative hallucination forms part of the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale (Form C) although these sort of ‘anti-hallucinations’ are only experienced by the most hypnotisable of people – as are most ‘cognitive’ suggestions that effect the experience of your own mind (rather than changes in the sensation of control of movement, which most people can experience something of).

There is a small literature on ‘negative hallucinations’ with several studies examining changes in electrical activity from the brain (‘evoked potentials’) as the hallucination becomes active.

It’s still not clear how negative hallucinations work exactly. Almost all studies have found changes to attention, our ability to selectively process perceptual information, although the data is inconsistent largely owing to the small number of studies – a constant bugbear of hypnosis research.

Link to April fools article PubMed entry.
pdf of full-text
Link to Google Scholar search of negative hallucination studies.
Link to PubMed search of negative hallucination studies.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent piece about psychologist Carol Dweck’s work which has highlighted how what you believe about intelligence has an effect on how you perform.

Dwecks’s work has garnered a great deal of attention and her main findings have suggested that children praised for their ‘hard work’ do significantly better when challenged with difficult problem that those who are told that they are ‘intelligent’.

The Chronicle article is a fantastic update to some of the more congratulatory pieces that have appeared in the press as it covers some of the work from other research groups that didn’t find the effect or has only found it under limited circumstances.

The studies wondered whether students’ beliefs about intelligence (“entity” [fixed] versus “incremental,” [flexible] in Dweck’s terms) would affect how long they practiced before taking the test, whether they chose to listen to distracting music while practicing, and how they would explain their low scores after taking the test.

The answer turned out to be: It depends. The Michigan studies divided the incremental theorists (that is, the students who implicitly believed that intelligence is malleable) into two groups: Those whose sense of self-worth was tied to academic performance and those who didn’t care so much about school. The latter group—those whose egos were not deeply invested in schoolwork—behaved as Dweck would have predicted. But among students whose self-worth was tied to academic performance, incremental theorists behaved similarly to students with “fixed” beliefs about intelligence. They avoided practicing, and they “self-handicapped.”

Link to Chronicle piece on Dwecks’ work.

Koro is the unfounded fear that the genitals are retracting into the body or have disappeared. It is usually classified by Western psychiatry as a ‘culture bound syndrome‘ as it typically appears Asian or African cultures in various forms but an article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine notes that it has shown up in most cultures at one time or another.

Koro–the psychological disappearance of the penis.

Mattelaer JJ, Jilek W.

J Sex Med. 2007 Sep;4(5):1509-15.

The aim of this article is to present a summarizing overview on ethnomedical aspects of koro (in Chinese called suo-yang), the panic anxiety state in which affected males believe that the penis is shrinking and/or retracting, and perhaps disappearing. While reduction of penile volume occurs physiologically due to vasoconstriction in cold temperature and intense anxiety, it is believed in certain cultures that genital shrinking leads to impotence and sterility, and eventually to death. Traditional Chinese medicine treats suo-yang, the reduction of the male principle yang, as a dangerous disturbance of the life-sustaining yin-yang equilibrium of the organism. Koro has therefore been held to be a Chinese “culture-bound” condition. However , the koro phenomenon is also known among diverse ethnic and religious groups in Asia and Africa, typically in cultures in which reproductive ability is a major determinant of a young person’s worth. Koro epidemics of panic anxiety due to widespread fears of losing one’s genitals, procreative ability, and even one’s life, are triggered by rumors of genital disappearance supposedly caused in China by female fox spirits, in Singapore and Thailand by mass poisoning, and in Africa by sorcery, usually in the context of socioeconomic or political tension. Today, in contemporary Western societies, ideas of genital disappearance are not culturally endorsed. But historically, it should be remembered that in the late Middle Ages in Europe, a man could lose his membrum virile through magical attacks by witches. The conclusion is that the psychological disappearance of the penis is a universal syndrome that was described recently in Asia and Africa and already in Medieval Europe.

Link to PubMed entry for article.
Link to Wikipedia page on the ‘koro’ belief.

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

BBC Radio 4’s excellent In Our Time had a discussion on William James’ landmark book ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’

The Neurocritic examines a curious study on the cognitive science of gaydar.

The brilliant behavioural economist Dan Ariely writes for Wired UK on habits and behavioural inertia in consumer decision-making.

Neuroskeptic has an insightful post that gets beyond the dopamine = ‘instant reward liquid’ stereotype that plagues popular neuroscience.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind recently had an excellent edition on HIV, dementia and the brain.

The BPS Research Digest comes out as a born-again introspector. Can I get an amen? You tell me brother.

The late great Richard Gregory gets a fitting send off with an obituary in The Times. A chap with a remarkably varied life.

Addiction Inbox has another one of its consistently excellent posts, this time on Al Hubbard “a former intelligence agent, rogue businessman, and general intellectual gadfly” who was one of the initiators of LSD therapy.

There is a jaw dropping and worrying report on BBC News about the growing epidemic of opium addiction in Afghanistan, with audio slideshow.

The Seminal blog seems to catch the American Psychological Association deleting and editing web pages that linked it to CIA torture workshops. Repression? Surely not.

Fashion students must compete with psychology students for retail jobs, reports New York Magazine bleakly. Sounds shit but it’ll probably be a reality show on cable some time soon.

BoingBoing has a visual study guide to cognitive biases.

Toddlers who lie ‘will do better’ demands BBC News. Or, at least, I think that’s what they’re doing. It could be something about early development of theory of mind.

Advances in the History of Psychology has found some archive films from the seminal development psychologist Kurt Lewin.

Caregivers for people with dementia more likely to also get the disease, reports Wired Science. Mechanism unknown.

New Scientist reports on an intriguing but somewhat overenthusiastic research report suggesting that ball lightning may be a hallucination.

The New York Times starts a philosophy section. Shit already hitting the conceptual fan.

Forensic psychology blog In the News covers an interesting angle on the story of anti-gay expert George Rekers being caught with a rent boy – he’s been an expert witness in countless court cases on homosexuality and the revelation may affect the weight of his expert testimony in past cases.

CBS News reports on a study finding that unattractive defendants 22 percent more likely to be convicted than good-looking ones and also get sentenced to an average of 22 months longer in prison.

The four stages of fear present themselves during an attack by a mountain lion! A great piece for Discover Magazine forms part of the brain special issue of the magazine.

Psicología Latina is a new journal in English and Spanish on on the history of psychology in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

There’s an icky but interesting account of treating President Lincoln’s fatal head wound over at Galen Press.

I just watched a thought-provoking BBC documentary called Mental: A History of the Madhouse which follows the history of British psychiatric treatment in the 20th century from the monolithic mental hospitals inherited from the 1800s to the development of ‘care in the community’ at the end of the century.

If you’re based in the UK you can watch it on the BBC’s streaming service but I also notice that it has appeared on various public torrent servers. *cough*

It’s definitely a dissenters look at history as the professional commentators, such as psychiatrist Joanne Moncrieff and psychologist Rachel Perkins, hail from the most critical end of mental health.

It’s probably true to say that 20th century psychiatry was not exactly a litany of success stories, although it would have been useful to hear some of the more positive angles as well.

However, I was interested to hear that one of the major figures in the removal of the old mental hospitals was conservative politician Enoch Powell who secured his place in history with his rabidly anti-immigration 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (synopsis: ‘we fought the war and now there are darkies everywhere!’).

Years earlier, however, he gave a speech that cemented his determination to dismantle the old hospital system and he didn’t mince words.

They imply nothing less than the elimination of by far the greater part of this country’s mental hospitals as they exist today. This is a colossal undertaking, not so much in the new physical provision which it involves, as in the sheer inertia of mind and matter which it requires to he overcome. There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside – the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault. Let me describe some of the defences which we have to storm…

The speech reads very strangely today as it was clearly the beginning of huge reforms while openly talking about ‘sub-normals’.

The documentary is well worth checking out. It largely focuses on the story of one hospital, High Royds, in West Yorkshire.

Interestingly, the hospital has had two rock tributes to it. The Kaiser Chief’s song ‘Highroyds’ and Kasabian’s album named ‘West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum’, riffing on its original name.

Link to info about the documentary.

An anonymous ex-member of the Human Terrain System, the team of social scientists deployed with the US Military, is now writing on the Wired Danger Room blog about role of the service in the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first article notes how in several recent operations the HTS has been notable by its absence.

As we’ve discussed before, the HTS project has been a source of some considerable controversy with fellow social scientists denouncing the project as ‘weaponised anthropology’ that violates the ‘do no harm’ principle.

The military intend the service to help understand the local population and complex alliances that define the social landscape in which they’re fighting but the Wired piece suggests that the Human Terrain System is being sidelined, either due to ignorance of its purpose or dislike of its approach amid the ranks.

How do you properly vet the insurgents you’re trying to “win over” to your side? Is simply promising not to attack your forces enough, or should you press for a formal integration with the government? At what point do a militant’s activities make him irredeemable?

Those are just some of the difficult choices facing U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan – questions explored in a fine, fine dispatch by the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe. In it, he tells the tale of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Brown, who led a group of soldiers during last year’s insurgent assault on Camp Keating, in Kamdesh district of Nuristan province. After the attack, Lt. Col. Brown faced a difficult choice: whether or not to align himself with a local warlord and militant, Mullah Sadiq, who promised to repel future Taliban attacks.

It seems like the sorts of question were designed to be answered by the Human Terrain System. HTS is the famously controversial U.S. Army program to embed various types of social scientists with Brigade Combat Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ostensibly, these Human Terrain Teams should be out, canvassing the local population to gauge their interests, feelings, and preferences. The local HTT is conspicuously absent from Jaffe’s account of the events following the Kamdesh attack…

In theory, the HTTs would able to offer advice and informed analysis to the various commanders making decisions about how to relate to these communities. Often, the commanders don’t even know enough to ask, and in at least a few cases, the HTTs don’t know how to “pitch” their services. As events in Nuristan indicate, even if there is an HTT in the area, their advice could fall on deaf ears. Worse still: if they are deliberately or even unintentionally excluded from the very process they were deployed to influence—then HTS as a whole is facing a much more serious problem: just what, exactly, are they expected to do?

The Danger Room series from the pseudonymous writer of piece, named ‘Security Crank’, should be an interesting insight into the project although the byline mentions that he or she is currently working in the ‘national security establishment’ so we can probably expect that criticism will only go so far.

Link to Wired Danger Room on HTA in Afghanistan.

During REM sleep, where most dreaming takes place, your eyes move around but it’s never been clear exactly why. A new study just published online by neuroscience journal Brain suggests that they are looking at the ever-changing dream world.

The first question you might ask is how the researchers knew what the dreamers were looking at. To study this, the project recruited people with a condition called REM sleep behaviour disorder who lack the normal sleep paralysis that keeps us still when we dream.

In other words, people with REM sleep behaviour disorder act out their dreams. We’ve discussed the fascinating condition before as it gives an outside view to the inner dream life of the affected person.

In this case, the researchers, led by neuroscientist Laurène Leclair-Visonneau, used electrodes to monitor the eye-muscle movements of 56 patients with REM sleep behaviour disorder and 17 healthy controls in a sleep lab, while also videoing their night-time movements.

The research team initially looked to see if there was a major difference in rapid eye movements between people with the condition and those without. They found that the groups were statistically indistinguishable – meaning that the sleep disorder wasn’t likely to be affecting the eye-movements themselves.

Knowing that REM eye-movements were not abnormal in people who acted out their dreams, the team then looked at the video and picked out where patients completed a ‘goal directed action’ while dreaming – such as picking up a dream object or reaching out to touch something.

By synchronising the videoed actions with the eye muscle recordings during REM sleep the researchers found that the eyes were fixed on the dream target 90% of the time.

In other words, when the eyes move during REM sleep they are looking at something in the dream world.

The eyes seem genuinely to be a bridge between the land of dream consciousness and waking life.

Link to PubMed entry for REM and dreaming study.

Medical journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation has a fascinating article on Phineas Gage’s years after his dramatic injury, updating previous accounts and suggesting he made a remarkable recovery after his initial change in character.

The piece is co-authored by Malcolm Macmillan, author of the definitive Gage book An Odd Kind of Fame and can contains many important updates and corrections on the story since the biography was released.

Unfortunately, the article is locked behind a $30 paywall (harsh, bit it keeps the plebs out) which is a pity as it carefully dsicusses Gage’s post-injury life and notes that while he seemed to have a marked change in character and behaviour shortly after the tamping iron was blown through his frontal lobes, in the long-term, he seemed to recover very well.

Reviewing Phineas’ post-accident history we note:

1. He resumes work on the family farm within four months of the accident, and seeks his old job as foreman within another four.

2. He adapts within two or three years to the vocation of “exhibiting”, possibly managing his appearances, advertising, and travel independently, and probably re-learning lost social skills.

3. He works for Currier during 1851-1852, where he possibly learns stagecoach driving and builds on his social re-learning.

4. He is settled and reliable enough in his behaviour for an employer to take him to Chile as a coach driver.

5. He works in Chile for 7 years in a highly structured occupation (possibly for just one employer) where he adapts to the language and customs, and uses the complex psychological and cognitive-motor skills required by his job.

6. Eventually his mental faculties are such that a doctor who had known him well sees “no impairment whatever” in them.

7. He is “anxious to work” after recovering from illness in San Francisco, and finds farm employment.

8. He continues to work even after his first seizure. Only now does he become unsettled and dissatisfied with a succession of employers.

We see in all of this how consistently Phineas sought to readapt.

On this summary, Phineas Gage made a surprisingly good psycho-social adaptation: he worked and supported himself throughout his post-accident life; his work as a stage-coach driver was in a highly structured environment in which clear sequences of tasks were required of him; within that environment contingencies requiring foresight and planning arose daily; and medical evidence points to his being mentally unimpaired not later than the last years of his life. Although that Phineas may not have been the Gage he once had been, he seems to have come much closer to being so than is commonly believed.

By the way, did you know a second photo of Gage has been uncovered. You can see it above. Apparently after the publicity surrounding the first the Gage family of Texas found this one in their family collection.

Link to PubMed entry for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation article.
Link to awesome Wikipedia article on Gage.

The latest Neuropod podcast tackles deep brain stimulation, blast injuries in soldiers, fibre-tracking brain scans and a group of hungover neurologists on an early morning run, in coverage from the recent American Academy of Neurology conference. In fact, it’s one of the best Nature Neuroscience podcasts I’ve heard in ages.

There’s also a fascinating bit about the history of phrenology by neurologist Daniel Schneider. Phrenology was the curious 19th practice of ‘reading bumps’ on the head to divine someone’s character based on the flawed idea that differences in brain structure would affect skull growth.

Schneider has searched medical and non-medical publications of the time and found, contrary to the belief that the practice was simply a fashion among the public, that the medical profession was more approving of the idea than the general populace.

As the practice was started by medical men it seemed respectable and gave a tool to help explain some scientific questions of the time, even if it didn’t live up to its promises.

As an aside, I note from the scientific programme of the meeting that neuropsychologist Brenda Milner was presenting some of her latest work on the recently departed amnesic patient HM.

It was pointed out to me that Milner is 92. Respect to that.

Link to Neuropod homepage.
mp3 of this podcast.

The legendary perception researcher Richard Gregory has passed away and science is certainly the worse off for his departure.

As a student he worked with the great Frederic Bartlett and later became one of the most influential researchers in perception. He was key in demonstrating that expectations and prior experience have a ‘top down’ influence and that perceptions are often just best guesses or hypotheses about the world.

His liberal use of visual illusions demonstrated this in an instantly graspable way, making his explanations clear and immediate, and he was the first to study the perceptual effects of having lifelong cataracts removed.

Previously it was thought that perception was largely ‘all there’ during early childhood, but the fact that people who had the operation as adults couldn’t distinguish objects from each other, for example, suggested that the developing visual system learns many assumptions essential to making sense of the world.

His book Eye and Brain has probably been read by virtually every undergraduate over the last 30 years and he co-founded the Experimental Psychology Society in the UK to promote psychological science at the highest level.

There is a fantastic interview series from The Wellcome Trust where he discusses the history of perception psychology which you can watch in full on YouTube if you want to get a handle on the breadth of his knowledge.

Gregory was also a keen promoter of science education and founded The Exploratory, the first ‘hands on’ science museum in the UK, where children and adults could get their hands dirty and see scientific principles in action.

It’s also worth saying that he was a very approachable and gentlemanly character. A previous Mind Hacks post, on the fact that he was in discussion with film director Roman Polanksi to make a 3D horror movie earlier in his career was prompted by Gregory himself after I had the pleasure of chatting to him at a science event and he mentioned the curious incident.

From what I can make out, his first publication listed on PubMed is from 1957 and his last is from 2010 – appropriately titled ‘Is it more fun to be an artist or a scientist?’.

Link to obituary for Richard Gregory from UCL.
Link to Gregory interview on the history of perception science.