Author: vaughan

There’s a great comedy sketch from British due Mitchell and Webb about an egotistical brain surgeon on YouTube.

It’s sarcastic, cutting and you can see the punchline coming a mile off, but still good for laugh as it satirises the effect of the ego on typical British small talk.

The only similar joke I’ve ever tried was to say to a neurosurgeon in the pub “that’s lucky, I’ve got this thing in my temporal lobe that’s been playing up, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind having a quick look”.

Lead balloon.

Link to Mitchell and Webb brain surgeon sketch.

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

New Scientist has an excellent piece on theories of how deep brain stimulation treats mental illness. Ignore the stupid title.

A study found by Barking Up the Wrong Tree finds higher intelligence is a “protective factor” against teenage sexual activity. Geek you say?

Slate has a fascinating article on cognitive distortions in how we think about geography and how they affect our judgements.

Noam Chomsky answers questions on cognitive science and anarchism on, er, reddit. Next week, Britney interviewed on PubMed.

NPR Morning Edition has a section on how ageing brains are slower but more shrewd.

There’s some excellent straight thinking coverage of the recent discovery of bones of an apparently new species of hominid over at Laelaps with Carl Zimmer using the opportunity to straighten out the ‘missing link’ fallacy.

The New York Times reports on how Google now return a crisis hotline when you do searches on how to commit suicide but only in English it seems. Half a billion Spanish speakers – una versión castellana por favor.

Spank me nanny, spank me! Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a study that explains how pain can be experienced as pleasurable. It’s all. about the. timing apparently.

The Guardian has a piece on an ‘anatomy of a media drug scare’ about the misreporting of UK drug deaths linked to currently legal drug mephedrone.

The New York Times visits a sanctuary for the exotic animals of dead drug lords in Colombia.

‘Supertaskers‘ or people who can multi-task without performance drop off are discussed in Time magazine.

Living the Scientific Life on What do Great Tits Reveal about the Genetics of Personality. Gutted.

There’s an excellent discussion of Allan Hobson’s neuroscientific theory of why we dream over at The Neuroskeptic.

Contemporary Psychotherapy magazine has just released it’s latest edition online.

There are some wonderful embroidered cellular scale neurobiology creations over at Bioemphemera.

The Neurocritic covers the American Academy of Neurology’s Neuro Film Festival which has some fantastic entries.

Is art the highest form of sanity? The Times has an intelligent discussion of the old ‘art and madness’ trope looking the misuse of the cliché in recent writing.

The Guardian has a video interview with David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of short stories about fantastic after-life possibilities. “We won’t die – our consciousness will live forever on the internet”.

A new study on impulsivity, dopamine and addiction is covered by the splendid Addiction Inbox.

BBC News has an excellent piece by consistently excellent Mark Easton on the UK government’s failure to assess how effective their billions on drugs treatment services work.

Synthetic Neurobiology: Optically Engineering the Brain to Augment Its Function. A talk by MIT neural engineer Ed Boyden from The Singularity Summit 2009.

The Splintered Mind muses on people who come across as smart and how this relates to genuinely being smart. By the way, if you don’t read the blog, it is a public fountain of emerging philosophical thinking.

The New York Times discusses the ‘The Myth of Mean Girls‘ contrasting public concerns about the behaviour of girls and the fact that every major index of crime shows that violence by girls has been plummeting for years.

The mighty Language Log has an evolutionary psychology bingo card. Eyes down for a full house.

The Onion has a brilliant video report: DEA Official Announces Successful Drug Bust on Son.

The ever-awesome BPS Research Digest discusses a still not completely convincing study that reports to have found the direct evidence for mirror neurons in the human brain using depth electrodes, including in the, er, hippocampus.

The Frontal Cortex has been excellent lately.

Following up on our discussion of the ‘psychological typhoon eye’ phenomenon, the Extreme Fear blog discusses how a similar effect was found during the World War Two London Blitz.

There’s a bizarre case report in the latest edition of Psychological Medicine where some Australian psychiatrists who specialise in disorders of old age got called out to a zoo to assess an elderly gorilla who was behaving strangely.

Unfortunately, the case report is full of medical jargon although it becomes quite charming when you realise that the psychiatrists just went about assessing the gorilla, running their standard tests as best they could, as if it was just another patient.

The bit where the doctors test the gorilla’s eye-tracking by waving a date around in front of it is pure joy.

In July 2006, in response to a call from the Melbourne Zoo, a home visit was made to examine a 49-year-old female Western Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), who had recently developed a confusional state with the following observed behaviors:

being apparently lost in her enclosure, which she had occupied for 15 years; unable to find her food; defecating in her nest; unable to locate the entry to her night den after being outside in the enclosure; loss of her dominant role as the senior matriarch and being bullied by younger females; apparently unable to see things in certain areas of her enclosure; being less responsive to her favorite keeper, who had cared for her since 1980.

The staff of the Zoo raised the question: is she developing a dementing illness? A domiciliary consultation by a psychogeriatrician from the University of Melbourne was therefore requested to assess this.

Previous history
The female gorilla had a history of low-grade cardiac disease associated with hypertension, and a serious renal infection had resulted in surgical removal of one kidney in 2003.

Examination
She was enticed to the edge of her enclosure to accept her favorite snack of dates, walking with a slow but steady gait. Using offered dates as targets for an ocular [eye] movement examination, the presence of nystagmus was identified, together with bilateral upward gaze palsy. In a team discussion with her keepers and the veterinarian, an observation schedule was developed for use over the next three weeks to track her behavior. At follow-up review, one month later, the observation schedule revealed fluctuating but slow improvement in all domains. On further examination, her ocular signs had settled.

Diagnosis
A diagnosis of post-TIA delirium was made. Her behavior and general function steadily improved over the next two months. Cerebral infarction [damage due to blood supply blockage] has previously been reported in a 29-year old chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes (Fish et al., 2004).

Outcome
Her physical decline occurred during 2007, and she was euthanized in November 2007 at the age of 50 years.

Autopsy report
There were multifocal to coalescing often aggregated, multiple small soft, white plaques within the meninges over the middle and posterior dorsal midline surface of the cerebrum (consistent with prominent arachnoid granulations).

Discussion
Autopsy revealed cerebral hemorrhages at globus pallidus and internal capsule, thus confirming the clinical diagnosis. Examination of the heart confirmed chronic myocardial fibrosis, and a pancreatic islet cell carcinoma [cancer] had metastasized [spread] to lung and liver. We suggest that the observation schedule so developed may be of use in future to observe other primates in captivity which develop confusional states.

I was also delighted to read that the scientific name for a Western Lowland Gorilla is ‘gorilla gorilla gorilla’.

Link to PubMed entry for case report.

As a follow-on from our recent post on the psychology of urban legends, I’ve just found a video interview with psychologist Nicholas DiFonzo, author of the book Rumor Psychology that we mentioned previously.

DiFonzo discusses some of the main conclusions of the research, including the major motivations for why people pass on hearsay, the most significant reasons for why people believe it, and the most effective ways of combating rumours.

A brief but interesting interview.

Link to interview on YouTube.

New Scientist has a fantastic article on making sense of cognitive genetics studies, the science that links certain versions of genes to behaviour, by taking the use and abuse of the MAOA gene as an example. If the name doesn’t ring a bell you may remember it being dubbed ‘warrior gene’, which as well as being inaccurate, was one of its least embarrassing moments.

For many decades, genetics and psychology only really interacted with the twin study, which, by comparing the differences between identical and non-identical twins, can indicate how much of the difference in the twins you’ve studied is due to the environment and how much has been inherited.

As it became possible to identify individual genes, and more importantly, as automated ‘gene chip‘ technology made this economical, studies began looking at differences between groups of people distinguished by simply having different versions of the same gene.

The idea is to see how a single gene influences behaviour, but because the gene and the everyday effect are so distant (it’s like trying to detect the effect of a day of farm weather on the flavour of your lunch) the story often gets mangled in the retelling.

The New Scientist article, by Not Exactly Rocket Science’s Ed Yong, tells the story of MAOA and its headline-making link with aggression, but it also serves as an essential hitchhiker’s guide to the science and pitfalls of linking genetics with behaviour.

However, the clearest sign yet that the gene is no ruthless determinant of behaviour came in 2002 when Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, published their findings about a sample of 442 men from New Zealand who they had followed from birth. A third of these men carried the MAOA-L variant. Now, aged 26, this group was indeed more likely than the others to have developed antisocial disorders and violent behaviour – but only if they had been poorly treated or abused as children. Moffitt and Caspi concluded that the so-called “warrior gene” affects a child’s sensitivity to stress and trauma at an early age. Childhood trauma “activates” bad behaviour, but in a caring environment its effect is quashed.

Since then, similar interactions between nature and nurture have become part and parcel of the MAOA story. Carriers of MAOA-L are more likely to show delinquent behaviour if they were physically disciplined as children. They are also more likely to be hyperactive in late childhood if their first three years were stressful, and to develop conduct disorders if their mothers smoked cigarettes while pregnant with them. The list goes on. Likewise, Beaver found that MAOA-H carriers were more likely to commit fraud, but only if they hung around with delinquent peers.

Link to NewSci article on MAOA, genes and behaviour.

Childhood amnesia is the phenomenon where we are generally unable to remember the earliest years of childhood. This is often assumed to be purely because the brain is too underdeveloped to successfully store and organise memories but an interesting study from 2000 reported that the extent of childhood amnesia differs between cultures and sexes.

Cross-cultural and gender differences in childhood amnesia

Memory. 2000 Nov;8(6):365-76.

MacDonald S, Uesiliana K, Hayne H.

In two experiments, we examined cross-cultural and gender differences in adults’ earliest memories. To do this, we asked male and female adults from three cultural backgrounds (New Zealand European, New Zealand Maori, and Asian) to describe and date their earliest personal memory. Consistent with past research, Asian adults reported significantly later memories than European adults, however this effect was due exclusively to the extremely late memories reported by Asian females. Maori adults, whose traditional culture includes a strong emphasis on the past, reported significantly earlier memories than adults from the other two cultural groups. Across all three cultures, the memories reported by women contained more information than the memories reported by men. These findings support the view that the age and content of our earliest memories are influenced by a wide range of factors including our culture and our gender. These factors must be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of autobiographical memory.

This doesn’t mean that brain development plays no role, of course, but it raises the question of how many of the things we recall from childhood are influenced by culture.

For example, memories that seem genuinely to be from the early years may appear that way due to us being brought up with the retelling of family stories or from seeing photographs and subsequently absorbing them as our own memories thanks to source amnesia.

It could be that this form of social remembering differs between cultures or is influenced by the sex of the child which may encourage people to report earlier or later memories, or alternatively, may actually strengthen genuine memories as they are re-told during our early years.

pdf of full text of culture and childhood amnesia study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Wired magazine’s Haiti Rewired blog has an excellent piece on the ‘psychological typhoon eye’ phenomenon, discovered after studies of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China, where those closest to the centre of the devastation actually reported less concern about their safety and health.

The effect was initially reported shortly after the disaster and was found to still be present in a follow-up study one year later.

From the Wired piece:

Two suggestions have been provided to account for the psychological eye, namely “psychological immunization” or “cognitive dissonance”. The former seemed like a plausible explanation after the initial survey, since there is wide anecdotal documentation of “coping measures” adopted by those who experience significant personal trauma or hazards. However, the fact that subsequent surveys found relatives experiencing a variation of the psychological eye, suggests that the extent of personal experience, which strongly drives psychological immunization, is not sufficient to account for the observed effect.

Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is defined as an uncomfortable psychological state in which two opposing cognitions are experienced and need to ultimately be reconciled. In the example of the psychological eye, the devastation of the area creates a sense of danger, yet the individual may have no choice but to remain close by, counter to the survival instinct. To reconcile these conflicting beliefs, the individual may unconsciously lower self-assessed risk to justify remaining in the area. Cognitive dissonance is very difficult (impossible?) to modify in the field, as noted by the authors, and thus, this proposal will remain more speculative until follow-up studies in a controlled fashion can be done.

The author, Nature’s Noah Gray, goes on to suggest that “Surveyors must maintain a cautious and healthy skepticism when interviewing survivors and assessing areas for aid because information provided and opinions given will not likely reflect the dire situations being experienced.”

One difficulty in these situations is that mental health workers usually hurriedly arrive from other countries and may not fully understand how trauma and psychological distress are experienced by the local population, or how they integrate with other sorts of decision-making.

We tend to assume that trauma is a universal reaction to a difficult situation but this singular concept is something of a mirage – common psychological reactions to devastation have differed over time and differ between cultures.

The model of trauma described as the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD simply doesn’t fit the common reactions of people from many cultures, despite the fact that this is the most common conceptual tool used by Western mental health workers.

In a 2001 article for the British Medical Journal psychiatrist Derek Summerfield noted:

Underpinning these constructs is the concept of “person” that is held by a particular culture at particular point in time. This embodies questions such as how much or what kind of adversity a person can face and still be “normal”; what is reasonable risk; when fatalism is appropriate and when a sense of grievance is; what is acceptable behaviour at a time of crisis including how distress should be expressed, how help should be sought, and whether restitution should be made.

In these cases, not understanding the local culture may mean that aid workers may assume that individuals don’t understand the risks of the situation, when, in fact, each may be basing their risk assessment on different priorities – as has been found in studies on cultural differences in risk perception.

Treating trauma seems like a no brainer. It intuitively seems like one of the most worthy and naturally important responses to a disaster, which is probably why disaster area are now often flooded with ‘trauma counsellors’ after the event (Ethan Watters’s book Crazy Like Us charts the response to the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka where floods of well-meaning but poorly trained therapists arrived in the following weeks much to the bafflement of the locals and annoyance of the established relief organisations).

However, this is actually one of few areas where well meaning but poorly prepared therapists can actually do harm. Although experiencing extreme danger raises the risk of mental illness, contrary to popular belief, only a minority of people caught up in disasters will experience psychological trauma and immediate psychological treatment, either in single or multiple sessions has found to be useless or to make matters worse.

The psychological impact of devastation changes through time and space and we need to be careful to understand its local significance lest we inadvertently amplify the chaos.

Link to Haiti Rewired on the ‘psychological typhoon eye’.

The Point of Inquiry podcast has a great discussion with psychologist Scott Lilienfeld about his new book ’50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology’ and why scientific-sounding mental fairy tales persist, despite them having no good evidence to support them.

The most interesting bit is where Lilienfeld tackles why such myths have their psychological power, which to me is far the most interesting aspect of why certain stories perpetuate.

Some ideas seem to have properties that give them social currency. Here’s one of my favourite and you can try it out yourself – the usual format of the conversation goes something like this:

– Remember Bobby McFerrin, the ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ guy?
– Yeah, I remember him.
– Killed himself.
– Huh, that figures.

This myth has no evidence for it whatsoever, Bobby McFerrrin is alive and well, but it became so widespread that Snopes created a page debunking the story.

What is it about this story that makes it so easily accepted? Or perhaps, we should ask, what is it about this story which makes it so attractive to pass on to others?

There has been a considerable amount of research on the psychology of rumours that attempts to explain why we are motivated to spread them. A fantastic book called Rumor Psychology reviews the research which indicates that uncertainty, importance or outcome-relevant involvement, lack of control, anxiety, and belief are crucial – but this doesn’t seem to apply to all such rumours (as an aside, it’s interesting that these principles seem rarely applied in military PsyOps campaigns e.g. see PsyWar.org Iraq war leaflet archive).

On a personal level, you can see how these principles might apply to trite ‘women are from mars, women are from venus’ pop relationship psychology, but it doesn’t seem to apply quite so well to the commonly repeated myth that we use only 10% of our brains.

And when we consider the ‘Bobby McFerrin topped himself’ story, none of it seems relevant. Perhaps this is better thought of as ‘gossip’, but unfortunately the psychology of gossip is much less developed and relies largely on pseudo-evolutionary ideas about social bonding and the like (Robin Dunbar’s book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language is perhaps the most developed example of this).

I often wonder if we need an experimental aesthetics of information that helps us understand why such stories are inherently attractive, in the same way that studies have begun to focus on what makes certain tunes catchy.

Link to Point of Inquiry podcast on PopPsy myths.

The journal Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience has an paper that looks at how rates of yawning change throughout our life.

It has a slightly surreal feel to it, and I can’t help imaging yawn scientists carefully tracking the behaviour across the globe with overly complicated machines, like something out of a Roald Dahl book.

Yawning throughout Life.

Front Neurol Neurosci. 2010;28:26-31.

Giganti F, Salzarulo P.

Yawning is a behavior that begins in the first stages of life. It has not only been observed in infants and in newborns, but also in fetuses of 12-14 weeks’ gestational age. Yawning frequency changes over the life span. In preterm infants, the number of yawns decreases between 31 and 40 weeks’ postconceptional age, mainly during the day. In this period of life, yawning is an isolated behavior rarely occurring in bursts, and its frequency is quite low with respect to adults. The incidence of yawning seems to increase when children attend elementary school, whereas this is reduced in the elderly. Aged people yawn less than younger ones, mainly during morning and mid-afternoon. In adults, the time course of yawning is associated with the time course of sleepiness, except upon awakening when the high frequency of yawns is not associated with high sleepiness. In adults, yawning frequency increases in the early morning and in the late evening, whereas at the earliest stages of development (fetuses and preterm infants) yawning does not show diurnal variations. Yawning seems to be involved in the modulation of arousal process across the whole life span. In preterm infants, yawning is often followed by motor activation and it is more common during waking than sleep; in adults, yawning occurs mainly at sleep onset and upon awakening.

Link to PubMed entry for paper on ‘Yawning throughout Life’.

What is Jesus’ Myers-Briggs personality profile? Rather to my surprise, it turns out that lots of people have tried to answer this question.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) questionnaire was created as a systematic approach to classifying people’s personality based on categories originally proposed by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung.

The Mormon Matters website has a completely charming article that attempts to analyse Jesus’ personality in terms of the Myers-Briggs types and concludes he’s an INFP – an Introverted, iNtuiting, Feeling, Perceiving type.

If this seems a little flippant for you – pay attention Anglican Vicars: the Sermons That Work website has a pre-written sermon that discusses Our Lord’s Myers-Briggs type and informs the flock that he’s likely a INFJ – an Introverted, iNtuiting, Feeling, Judging type.

Profiling Jesus seems to have become a minor passtime in some circles. In fact, Yahoo! Answers has a thread where people were discussing the possibilities. The thread is marked as a ‘Resolved Question’ (!) with the best answer being voted as ENFJ – an Extroverted, iNtuiting, Feeling, Judging type.

Anecdotal evidence! I hear you cry. Fear not, there is some peer-reviewed data on the personality of the Messiah.

The Journal of Psychology and Theology published a paper entitled “Students’ perceptions of Jesus’ personality as assessed by Jungian-type inventories” back in 2004. You can read the full text online, but the abstract alone is pure joy:

The present study was the first phase of an exploration of college students’ perceptions of the personality of Jesus Christ as assessed by two Jungian-type inventories, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1998) and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (Keirsey, 1998), which categorize personality along four dimensions: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judgment/Perception. Along with an overall exploration of students’ perceptions, the present study focused on whether students were likely to make self-based attributions in their perceptions of Jesus’ personality. Results indicated that students perceived Jesus to be an Extravert Feeler and made self-based attributions along the Sensing/Intuitive dimension, with 43% perceiving Him to be an Intuitive-Feeler and 37% perceiving Him to be a Sensing-Judger. Perceptions of Jesus as a Judger or Perceiver were divided, with those placing more importance on modeling Jesus more likely to see Him as a Judger, and those placing less importance on modeling Him perceiving Jesus as a Perceiver.

Since we’re already working on his Myers Briggs profile, I wonder if someone would hazard a guess at how he would score on the… oh stop it already. You’ll only give Dan Brown ideas.

Link to study on students’ MBTI profiles for Jesus.

The founder of the oldest psychiatric hospital in Latin America was an ex-soldier turned criminal who broke out of jail, escaped the law with the help of a prostitute, and eventually ended up destitute after spending his entire fortune caring for the mentally ill.

I’ve just discovered the amazing story of Bernardino Álvarez after reading up on the (surprisingly sparse) literature on the history of psychiatry in Latin American and particularly the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, the oldest institution on the continent.

The hospital, still in existence as the Fray Bernardino Hospital (although, apparently not in the original building), was founded in 1567 by Álvarez – a remarkable chap who became interested in caring for the mentally ill after attempting for to make amends for a life spent fighting, gambling, debauching, whoring and living off daring crime sprees.

This is from what seems to be the only English language article on his life, from a 1972 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry. It reads like a movie script:

After arriving at what is now Mexico City he was sent to the countryside and fought in several actions in the war against the chichimecas in the north of New Spain. Apparently he was a soldier without too many scruples, for a biographer says that “hate, tears and curses” usually followed him. He wanted a shortcut to wealth, however; he disliked discipline and had no taste for the military life.

After this campaign Alvarez returned to Mexico City, then a lively and tempting emporium. Soon he was in trouble, gambling and robbing the gambling houses, drinking heavily, rebelling against the law, joining the delinquents of the city, and eventually being chosen the leader of a small gang. “A handsome and perfidious demon”: this is the way he was described at that time. Finally he and his band were apprehended, imprisoned, and sentenced to forced labor in China. They escaped from prison, though, killing three guards in the process. Some of the band were eventually caught again and hanged but Alvarez, through the aid of a close friend, a prostitute, got arms, money, and horses. He fled to Acapulco and then by sea to Peru.

He later became a wealthy and legitimate business man and, shocked by the way the mentally ill were treated, used his money to build the first mental hospital in the New World.

He was so dedicated that he apparently ended up spending his entire fortune on his new found mission and ended up living in a meagre cell in his own hospital by the time he died.

Link to PubMed entry for article on Bernardino Álvarez.

If you’re wanting an antidote to all the Brizendine ‘male brain’ silliness which is floating round at the moment, Scientific American Mind has an excellent article by straight-thinking neuroscientist Lise Eliot that looks at the actual evidence for sex differences and how relatively minor differences at birth get shaped and amplified by how we guide children into certain preferences and behaviours.

Eliot has written Pink Brain, Blue Brain, probably the single best book I’ve ever found on the psychology and neuroscience of sex differences and gendered-behaviour.

It carefully and engagingly examines stereotypes in the light of evidence from both biological and social studies and the Scientific American Mind article tackles a similarly incisive tack:

So whereas men and boys score higher on measures of physical and verbal aggression, girls and women score higher on most measures of empathy, or the awareness and sharing of other people’s emotions, conclude psychologist Nancy Eisenberg of Arizona State University and her colleagues in studies dating back to the 1980s.

And yet the sex difference in empathy is smaller than most people realize and also strongly dependent on how it is measured. When men and women are asked to self-report their empathetic tendencies, women are much likelier than men to endorse statements such as “I am good at knowing how others will feel” or “I enjoy caring for other people.” When tested using more objective measures, however, such as recognizing the emotions in a series of photographed faces, the difference between men and women is much smaller, about four tenths of a standard deviation, meaning the average woman is more accurate than just 66 percent of men.

In children, the difference is tinier still, less than half that found in adults, reported psychologist Erin McClure of Emory University in 2000 after analyzing more than 100 studies of sex differences in facial emotion processing in infants, children and adolescents. So although girls do start out a bit more sensitive to other people’s faces and emotions, their advantage grows larger with age, no doubt because of their stronger communication skills, more practice at role playing with dolls and more intimate friendships as compared with boys.

Eliot effortlessly translates the broad scope of the scientific research into compelling prose and goes about questioning the ‘mars and venus’ stereotypes with an in-depth knowledge of the mind and brain.

If someone could send Brizendine a copy, I think we’d all be better off.

Link to SciAmMind article ‘The Truth about Boys and Girls’.
Link to more info on Eliot’s book Pink Brain, Blue Brain.

Paste Magazine has an article on ‘Eight Musical Homages to the Asylum’ about some of the most famous, and infamous, songs and videos about being institutionalised.

It was kindly posted by Mind Hacks reader Clifton Wiens in response to our previous post about jazz legend Charlie Parker having written what I thought was the only known song about an artist’s own stay in a psychiatric hospital (and not just admission to mental hospitals in general, of which there are lots).

However, the Paste Magazine article notes that James Taylor’s “Knockin’ ’Round the Zoo” is about his 1965 stay in McLean Hospital.

Another reader, Hugo, noted in the comments that Scandinavian metal band Diagnose: Lebensgefahr wrote an album called Transformalin about one of the member’s stays in hospital, although forgive me if I remain a little sceptical about the somewhat traditionally theatrical claims of black metal, although I could be wrong.

Recently, however, I’ve discovered that there was a whole concept album based around an artists’ stay in a mental hospital – by who else – but Alice Cooper. The album was called From the Inside and was apparently inspired by Coopers’ admission for alcoholism.

Any other suggestions gratefully received.

Link to ‘Eight Musical Homages to the Asylum’.

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

The LA Times reviews a new book on how ‘The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’, originally a 60s hippie collective who became America’s biggest drug dealers.

Magnetic stimulation of an area in the right hemisphere alters our sense of morality, according to research expertly covered by Neurophilosophy.

The Nursing Times has an article on the recent ‘Facebook causes syphilis’ nonsense by our very own Dr Petra.

How blind is double-blind? Asks Neuroskeptic in a discussion on how easy it is for patients to work out whether they’re taking placebo or the Mickey Finn.

Nature News discusses the coming illegalisation of mephedrone in the UK. A few days later a UK government drugs advisor quits over the process. I think that makes eight resignations in the last few months.

A case of epilepsy causing the sensation of ‘multiple presences‘ is brilliantly covered by The Neurocritic.

MIT Tech Review discusses new research that examines how stroke damages the network of communication in the brain and what this can tell us about real-world disability.

There’s a brief but interesting post on the relationship between teeth-grinding and neurotocism over at Paracademia. The medical term for teeth-grinding is bruxism which I always think sounds quite endearing.

The Psychologist has an interesting Jesse Bering article on the question of whether some religious thinking could be a side-effect of cognitive process selected by evolution.

“The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting“. The Frontal Cortex tackles travel and the economics of happiness.

New Scientist has a special issue on ‘Nine Neural Frontiers‘ that includes articles on everything from mirror neurons to the subconscious.

Scientists discover gene and part of brain that make people gullible, according to stunning new research covered by Not Exactly Rocket Science.

NPR discuss a Harvard economist’s study on projected tax from legalised weed and coke, which could be much less than many people assume.

Scary health messages can backfire, according to research covered by the newly beautiful BPS Research Digest.

The Point of Inquiry podcast has an interview with skeptical psychologist Scott Lilienfeld on ’50 Myths of Popular Psychology’.

Treating serious mental illness with psychotherapy is the topic of an interesting discussion on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters.

PsyBlog looks at seven unusual psychological techniques for boosting creativity.

There’s a review of ‘Manufacturing Depression’ by Gary Greenberg over at The Guardian.

New Scientist discussed research on how paralysed limbs could be revived by hacking into nerves.

Video from a debate over ‘voodoo correlations’ in fMRI is available on the website of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

The Economist discusses whether it’s possible to build in ethical behaviour to pilotless drone warplanes.

Screening for postpartum
“>depression is not worth the time or money, according to a new study covered by Brain Blogger.

Ockham’s Razor, the ABC Radio National essay programme, discusses ‘the wise delinquency of decision makers’.

An invention by author Margaret Atwood to allow for remote paper signing appears in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

The Guardian meets an Amazonian tribe that can only count up to five and discusses what different conceptions of numeracy mean for the psychology of maths.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman is in conversation with author Will Self in a video event for Intelligence Squared.

New Scientist has a brief but worthwhile introduction to ‘embodied cognition’.

A recent documentary on the psychology of anti-gay hate crime is featured on the excellent forensic psychology blog, In the News, with an interview with the blog’s author about her research on motivations for anti-gay violence.

Barking up the Wrong Tree is a minimalist blog that posts some amazing studies about human behaviour.

If you were interested in whether taking out health insurance encourages obesity, which countries have the most emotionally distant people or how female-directed porn movies differ from male-directed porn movies the blog has found a peer-reviewed study to answer these and many other questions, many of which you never even thought of asking.

The author, Eric Barker, also posts some great stuff to Twitter on the @bakadesuyo account which is well worth following.

Link to Barking up the Wrong Tree blog.

More than half a century before Alfred Kinsey started to study the surprising diversity of human sexual behaviour, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher surveyed Victorian-era women on their bedroom behaviour but buried the results. Her report, its accidental discovery, and the sex lives of 1890s women are covered in a fascinating article for Stanford Magazine.

Mosher was an amazing woman by all accounts and took a scientific approach to testing some of the ‘received wisdom’ of the day, such as that women were inherently weaker and that menstruation was necessarily disabling.

As part of her work, she surveyed women on their experience of sex and sexuality, much as Kinsey would do many decades later.

Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they’d gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like “watching farm animals.” Yet no matter how sheltered they’d initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.

Unlike Mosher’s other work, the survey is more qualitative than quantitative, featuring open-ended questions probing feelings and experiences. “She’s actually asking these questions not about physiology or mechanics—she’s really asking about sexual subjectivity and the meaning of sex to women,” Freedman says. Their responses were often mixed. Some enjoyed sex but worried that they shouldn’t. One slept apart from her husband “to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.” Some didn’t enjoy sex but faulted their partner. Mosher writes: [She] “Thinks men have not been properly trained.”

The whole article is an amazing read, both because Mosher was clearly such a pioneering researcher in a largely male dominated world and because her survey overturns many of our stereotypes about Victorian sexuality.

Link to Stanford Magazine on ‘The Sex Scholar’ (via MeFi)

This is, I assume, the first neuropsychological test to appear on a bog roll. The ‘Mind Trainer Toilet Roll‘ has a different puzzle on each sheet and it includes the Stroop test, one of the most studied tests in cognitive science.

This means you’ll never be without the opportunity to measure attentional inhibition of automatic cognitive processes in the bathroom.

Now if only I could get a bidet that measured working memory, my life would be complete.

Link to Mind Trainer Toilet Roll.
Link to Wikipedia page on the Stroop effect (via @jonmsutton)

Those tenacious chaps over at Language Log have followed up Louann Brizendine’s claims that men have a ‘defend your turf area’ by chasing up the references in her ominous new book The Male Brain which is showing all the signs of being as scientifically shaky as the last one.

Like a couple of people who commented on our post, they picked up on my previous and erroneous remark that the dorsal premammilliary nuclei had not been identified in humans – it has, but its function, as far as I know, has never been studied in humans (the previous post has now been updated).

Language Log also note that many of the Brizendine’s claims seem to be drawn from directly from rat studies and just assumed to apply to humans even when they specifically refer to, er, cat odor.

In other words, the DPN is involved in rats’ (passive) defensive responses to the presence of a cat, or even just to cat odor, but not to other sorts of threats such as the open arms of a maze, or an electric shock to the foot, where odor is not involved. Thus the DPN is more (and also less) than “the defend-your-turf area” in rats — it responds to predator threats as well as threats from dominant conspecifics, but it’s apparently not involved in more active or aggressive forms of defense. Who knows what its homologue’s functions are in humans – but presumably the mediation of instinctive “freezing, avoidance, and stretch” responses to cat odor are not among them.

The book was just reviewed in The New York Times which also wasn’t impressed by its scientific basis, noting “Brizendine’s trick, after all, is to give a scientific veneer to “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.””, although you can bet it will still be all over the glossy magazines.

To be fair, I’ve not read Brizendine’s new book, although I read the last one and her ‘male brain’ articles I’ve read so far just seem equally dodgy.

Link to Language Log on ‘The defend-your-turf area?’.
Link to NYT review.

I’ve just re-read an interesting biographical study from last year on the ‘Neurological problems of jazz legends’ and noticed a interesting snippet about Charlie Parker:

As a result of a car accident as a teenager, Parker became addicted to morphine and, in turn, heroin. Contemporary musicians took similar drugs, hoping to emulate his playing. Through the 1940s, Parker’s career flourished. He recorded some of his most famous tunes, including ‘‘Billie’s Bounce’’ and ‘‘Koko.’’ Yet, he also careened erratically between incredible playing and extreme bouts of alcohol and drug abuse. This deteriorated in 1946, when after the recording of the song ‘‘Lover Man,’’ Parker became inebriated in his hotel room, set fire to his mattress, and ran through the hotel lobby wearing only his socks. Parker was arrested and committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where he stayed for 6 months. This stay inspired the song ‘‘Relaxin at Camarillo (1947).’’

The track Relaxin at Camarillo is available on YouTube and it has a wonderfully rambling swing-backed sound. As far as I know, it is the only song about a stay at a mental hospital, but as musicians have had more than their fair share of hospital stays, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were any others, so do let me know if you know of any others.

By the way, the full article on the neurological problems of jazz legends is available online and has six biographies of jazz greats. There’s also a fascinating anecdote related by the author regarding a possible emperor’s new clothes moment during Thelonious Monk’s mental decline:

A personal anecdote: The author’s father, a professional jazz trumpeter, attended an outdoor concert in which Monk simply stared at the keyboard for the 16 bars of his solo but ultimately returned to playing as the next soloist took his course. The audience applauded wildly, assuming that if Monk was thinking through the course but not actually playing, then it must have been astounding, even immanent and transcending a human’s ability to perform much less understand. In retrospect, Monk’s mental status was disordered enough [whether dominated by depressed mood or confusion] that he must have been unable to perform for that verse.

Likely a moment of confusion but I prefer the version where the internal music soars above Monk’s declining skills.

Link to ‘Neurological problems of jazz legends’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to Relaxin’ at Camarillo.
Link to previous entry on the study’s beat poem abstract.

In 1987, British TV station Channel 4 had a series called Voices that included four programmes on psychoanalysis. One of the guests was psychologist Sherry Turkle, years before she became well-known for her groundbreaking work on the internet and identity, and she makes some strikingly prophetic comments about free will and technology that ring true today but were dismissed at the time.

This is from the book (ISBN 0851244920) of the discussions. In this part, Turkle was talking with presenter Michael Ignatieff and psychoanalysts Philip Rieff and Geoffrey Hartman. Unfortunately, the text is a direct transcript so it retains the awkwardness of the spoken word written down but you can see that she had remarkable foresight.

Turkle: I’m seems to me that the issue of free will is for us today what sex was for the Victorians. The same urgency about sexuality and interdictions about sexuality that so tormented the Victorian spirit, we are now tormented by questions having to do with whether or not we are actors, our own centre, whether, to take computer examples, whether we are programmed from the outside. In what sense are we not like machines? In sociobiology, it raises the question in what sense are we like or not like animals, in a very serious way. It seems to me that fields of study like Artificial Intelligence, like sociobiology, the use of computer metaphors to describe people in everyday parlance, much as psychoanalysis was picked up in everyday parlance – ‘I’m debugging a relationship’ – that kind of talk, raises the issue of free will and to the extent to which we are actors in a very urgent, hot way. And that Freud remains an urgent and a hot thinker, not just for the contribution about sexuality, the family, the question of parents, but by this discovery of the unconscious which makes us take seriously a way of talking about this sense in which we are not our own centre.

Rieff: I don’t think that that is what is happening. I think that the self, the ego, the agent of reality is being fragmented…