Author: vaughan

The FBI has an appointment-only display called the Evil Minds Research Museum that displays the letters, art and artefacts of serial killers in an attempt to understand their psychology. There’s not much about it online but it is discussed in the second part of the two part FBI podcast about their behavioural science programme.

This is the part where head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Greg Vecchi, describes the exhibit:

One of the most exciting research projects that we have, is we’ve have started what we have labeled the ‘Evil Minds Research Museum.’ And what this is, this is actually a research museum where we are collecting serial killer and other offender artifacts.

And so these artifacts are like paintings, John Wayne Gacey paintings. Paintings that he was the Killer Clown back in Chicago several decades back, who would kill men and boys, and he would dismember their bodies and put them under his floor board. Well, after he was caught, well, he turned out to be a so-called killer of the community [NB: this is a transcription error, Vecchi actually says ‘pillar of the community’], and he would dress up as a clown and do gigs doing clown stuff for the kids. And so he would draw pictures or paint pictures of clowns, and he had clown paintings in the room where he dismembered the bodies. And he had clown paintings that he did after he got arrested and when he was basically on death row.

And so we got those paintings and we are studying those paintings. We want to look at the brush strokes. We want to look at what drives him, what changes, because the pictures are completely different. Before he was arrested, for instance, the clowns were Flippo the Clown, very happy clowns, very colorful; afterwards his paintings were very dark. It was basically a skeleton or a skull dressed up or painted up to be a clown.

We’ve have got thousands and thousands of pages of correspondence between a number of serial killers. Richard Ramirez, the night stalker. We’ve got Keith Hunter Jesperson, another famous serial killer, his complete manifesto of why he killed, written in his own handwriting. We have greeting cards, we have photos, we have serial killer art. But the museum itself, and here is where the value of it is, for the most part, almost all of the research of law enforcement is usually done interacting with the subject rather through an investigation, or, in what we do, more of a research-type of approach, where we would sit down with protocols and interview them like we do with the serial killers, or like we are doing with the hostage takers now. This is stuff that is taken out of their most personal possessions. Things that were not taken as law enforcement, but were taken on search warrants, or provided, maybe after they were executed, by their family. And so it gives a completely different perspective of their mindset—where they are coming from because this is correspondence to themselves, correspondence between them and their loved ones—their mother, their father—correspondence between them and other serial killers, and even correspondence between them and the many groupies that write to them and develop a relationship as a pen pal. And so this is a very exciting research, this research museum, where we are looking at their motivation and try to understand them from a perspective that, as far as we know, has never been undertaken.”

Although it’s not open to the public, you can apply to visit if you’re a genuine researcher with the visiting scholars programme.

One such visit is described in the latest issue of the Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association. You can download the magazine for free, although only in one 7Mb pdf. The article about the unit starts on page 14 and has pictures of several of the exhibits.

Interestingly, the article is followed by a museum advert which asks for donations of exhibits, although I have to say, it’s not the most tasteful piece of promotion I’ve ever seen as it looks more like a B-movie horror poster. Click here to see it in all its dubious glory.

By the way, did you know that the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit has a student intern programme? If you’re a student and would like to apply the details are online.

Link to part 1 of FBI podcast on behavioural science.
Link to part 2 of FBI podcast on behavioural science.
pdf of latest Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association.
Link to details of FBI behavioural science intern scheme.

Discover magazine has a fantastic Carl Zimmer piece about a man who lost the ability to see things in his mind’s eye after a minor neurological procedure.

Zimmer covers a recently published study on patient MX who lost his conscious visual imagery but could still do tests, like mental rotation, that were assumed to need the ability to mentally picture the procedure to work it out.

All the exams the scientists gave MX confirmed his claim that he was missing his mind’s eye. And yet he could do lots of things that would seem impossible without one. Without any effort he could give the scientists detailed descriptions of landmarks around Edinburgh, for example. He could remember visual details, but he couldn’t “see” them. Della Sala and Zeman asked MX to say whether each letter of the alphabet had a low-hanging tail (like g and j). He got every one right. They asked him about specific details of the faces of famous people (“Does Tony Blair have light-colored eyes?”). He did just as well as the architects.

The key insight came with a test derived from a classic psychological experiment invented in the 1970s by Stanford University psychologist Roger Shepherd. Della Sala and Zeman showed MX pairs of pictures, each one consisting of an object made up of 10 cubes. MX had to say whether the pairs of objects were different things or actually the same thing shown from two different perspectives. Normal people solve this puzzle in a strikingly consistent way, with their response time depending on how much the angle of perspective differs between the two objects: The bigger the difference, the longer it takes people to decide whether the objects are the same…

MX’s results flew in the face of that explanation. When he solved the puzzles, he always took about the same amount of time to answer—and he got every one right.

We still understand relatively little about the role and importance of visual mental imagery or what role it takes in problems or impairments.

A study I was part of found that people with congenital prosopagnosia, a genetic inability to recognise faces, had virtually absent visual imagery despite having no signs of brain damage or neurological abnormalities.

Patients who acquire prosopagnosia after brain damage often report that they can no longer imagine what faces look like, but in MX’s case, he seems to have lost his ability to mentally ‘see’ faces but has no problem recognising people.

The Discover article is a concise yet comprehensive take on this new study that helps us understand the link between how we experience the world and how we construct it inside our heads.

Link to Discover article ‘Look Deep Into the Mind’s Eye’.

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

New Scientist has an excellent article on the ‘global workspace’ theory of consciousness.

Fast food logos unconsciously speed up our behaviour, according to new research covered by the old Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Not Exactly Rocket Science, just moved to Discover Blogs, asks ‘when is attempted murder more acceptable than harming someone by accident?’

Why are so many soldiers on antipsychotics? asks Pharmalot.

CNN considers the interesting question of whether school memorials for pupils who have killed themselves risk suicide contagion.

The fact and fiction behind the myth-attracting drink absinthe are discussed by Neuroskeptic.

Wired UK have another of their monthly columns by the brilliant Dan Ariely. This on the effect of anger on decision-making.

Facebook linked to rise in syphilis according to a dodgy press story debunked by Dr Petra.

The New Republic has a review of ‘Addiction: A Disorder of Choice’ by conservative psychiatrist Sally Satel.

A fossilized 13th century brain with intact cells was discovered, analysed, and Neurophilosophy has the low down with a remarkable image.

The New York Times has a short but sweet piece on why we need to dream by science writer Jonah Lehrer.

The excellent Addiction Inbox asks whether ‘meth babies‘ are fact or fiction in light of new research finding brain abnormalities to newborns exposed to speed in the womb.

Brainspin has more debunking of the scientific dodginess in the dreadful ‘why men obsess over sex’ article.

In societies with higher levels of disease, more masculine male faces are considered more attractive, more feminine male faces become more attractive when there’s less disease about, at least according to research covered in The Economist.

“I rather welcome the twang of bluegrass… from a patient’s cellphone during a psychotherapy session”. Insights into patients’ extra-therapy lives through one-side of a cellphone conversation considered by a therapist writing in The New York Times.

Psychiatry Fun looks like a promising new blog.

‘Pathways to and from violent extremism: the case for science-based field research’, just published in Edge.

The New York Times has a troubling piece about the mental health system in post-earthquake Haiti.

The award winning BPS Research Digest discusses research on how the sight of their own blood is important to some people who self-harm.

Frontier Psychiatrist has a fascinating post on how the ‘critical period’ in child development may be a result of modern family structure that differs from the collective childcare of times past.

The psychology of how certain issues become ‘sacred’ in negotiations is discussed in Scientific American.

The New York Times has a brief article on body dysmorphic disorder or BDD, where affected people come to believe that a part of their body is grossly unattractive or misshapen despite it seeming normal to others.

Study published in Frontiers in Cognition finds superior cognitive flexibility in first person shooter gamers. I have come here to chew bubble gum and switch tasks… and I’m all out of bubble gum.

When you feel weak, restating your core values can be a quick and easy self-control booster according to research covered by PsyBlog. “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” I feel better already.

Neuroworld asks the interesting question of why sex has never been offered as a legitimate public prize for doing good.

Psychologist Jesse Bering has written one of the most remarkable popular science articles I have read in a very long time that discusses, believe it or not, zoophilia or the sexual attraction to animals. The piece for Scientific American is surprising, unnerving, hilarious, frightening and thought-provoking, all in equal measure.

The article considers to what extent sexual attraction to animals is a perversion, opportunistic sex act or a genuine sexual orientation and gives a comprehensive review of the (admittedly few) scientific studies in the area.

But the stereotypical portrait of the zoophile as a woman-deprived, down-on-the-farm, and poorly educated male is presently being challenged by some contemporary findings. The most fascinating of these, in my opinion, is a set of two case studies published by University of Montreal psychologist Christopher Earls and his colleague Martin Lalumière, of the University of Lethbridge. The first case study appeared in 2002 in the journal Sexual Abuse and documented the story of a low-IQ’ed, antisocial, fifty-four-year-old convict who had a strong sexual interest in horses. In fact, this was why he was in prison for the fourth time on related offenses; in the latest incident, he had cruelly killed a mare out of jealousy because he thought she’d been giving eyes to a certain stallion. (You thought you had issues.)

The man’s self-reported sexual interest in mares was actually verified by a controlled, phallometric study. When hooked up to a penile plethysmograph [a hard-on measuring device] and shown nude photos of all varieties and ages of humans, the man was decidedly flaccid. Nothing happening down there either when he looked at slides of cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, or cows. But he certainly wasn’t impotent, as the researchers clearly observed when the subject was shown images of horses.

Blimey.

The documentary Animal Passions is a serious attempt to understand the motivations of people who are sexually attracted to animals. Many of the people claim, apparently sincerely, to want to be in fulfilling romantic relationships with other species. Needless to say, it is similarly eye-opening. Although unnerving at times, it is not gratuitious and, in fact, is available on YouTube.

Bering discusses what science and philosophy makes of these unusual attractions and does a fantastic job of covering a difficult topic.

Link to Bering’s article on zoophilia at Scientific American.

This week’s Nature has an article arguing that the recently popular field of moral psychology has neglected the role of public debate and personal reflection in the development of our morality.

The piece is by psychologist Paul Bloom, well known for his work on how we solve ethical problems – something which has become a hot topic in recent years as traditionally philosophical issues have been taken into the lab.

Indeed, many psychologists think that the reasoned arguments we make about why we have certain beliefs are mostly post-hoc justifications for gut reactions. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, although we like to think of ourselves as judges, reasoning through cases according to deeply held principles, in reality we are more like lawyers, making arguments for positions that have already been established. This implies we have little conscious control over our sense of right and wrong.

I predict that this theory of morality will be proved wrong in its wholesale rejection of reason. Emotional responses alone cannot explain one of the most interesting aspects of human nature: that morals evolve. The extent of the average person’s sympathies has grown substantially and continues to do so. Contemporary readers of Nature, for example, have different beliefs about the rights of women, racial minorities and homosexuals compared with readers in the late 1800s, and different intuitions about the morality of practices such as slavery, child labour and the abuse of animals for public entertainment. Rational deliberation and debate have played a large part in this development.

If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, I recommend a 2008 article from Prospect magazine that gives a great introduction to the field.

Link to Nature article ‘How do morals change?’
Link to Prospect article ‘The emerging moral psychology’.

This is the final resting place of Kitty Jay.

The site, known as Jay’s Grave lies on the edge of Dartmoor, in England’s West Country. No one really knows the full story of her life, as the details have been lost in time, but the tragic tale usually goes something like this.

Kitty Jay was a teenage orphan, probably in the late 1700s, who was given a job in a local farm as an apprentice and later became pregnant by the farmer’s son. Some stories say she fell in love, others that she was raped, but either way, was considered to be an outcast, such was the attitude of the time.

In despair, she hung herself at the farm and this is where she lies. Although we know little about her life, we can infer a few things from her last moments from her now peaceful resting place.

Suicide, then usually referred to as self-murder, was a stigmatised act in the 1700s. In an article on the changing attitudes towards suicide at the time, historian Michael MacDonald describes how:

Self-murderers were tried posthumously by a coroner’s jury, and if they were found to have been responsible for their actions savage penalties were enforced against them and their families. They were declared to have been felones de se, felons of themselves: their chattels, like those of other felons, were forfeited to the crown and placed at the disposal of the king’s almoner or the holder of a royal patent. Their bodies were denied the usual rites of Christian burial. By ancient custom, based on popular lore, the corpses of suicides were interred at a crossroads or in some other public way, laid face down in the grave with a wooden stake driven through them leading to both penalties for the family – mainly the confiscation of property – and spiritual punishment for the deceased, as they were not allowed to be buried on consecrated ground.

The influence of the devil was thought to be key, part of the reason self-murderers were reviled, but this involved a psychological judgement of the deceased. The devil could only tempt those who had the power of reason:

The state of mind of self-killers at the time that they committed their fatal deed was crucial. Men and women who slew themselves when they were mad or otherwise mentally incompetent were not guilty of their crime. Edmund Wingate explained concisely that suicides had to be sane and to take their lives intentionally to be guilty of self-murder: “He is felo de se that doth destroy himself out of premeditated hatred against his own life, or out of a humour to destroy himself’. Idiots or lunatics who were insane when they killed themselves were judged non compos mentis by the coroner’s jury and spared both the secular and the religious punishments for suicide.

Attitudes softened as time went on, however, and by the time of Kitty’s presumed death, the courts declared that most suicides were due to insanity.

Kitty, it seems, was an exception. She was presumably judged sane, and therefore wicked, and buried at a crossroads. Perhaps the fact that she lacked a family meant the coroner’s jury had little incentive to show her leniency.

Her grave, however, is peaceful. It has always had flowers. Legend has it that Dartmoor pixies place them there, but it was known that author Beatrice Chase took the responsibility for many decades.

I have seen Jay’s Grave many times, as it is a regular resting place for walkers, but in recent years it has been resplendent with floral tributes.

Like the Cross Bones graveyard in London, it has become a point of remembrance for forgotten and abandoned people, in the hope that our collective crimes of convenient amnesia are not repeated.

I visited this morning with my father and, for the first time, we left flowers.

Link to Wikipedia page on Jay’s grave.

Madrid is one of the very few places in the world that has emergency response psychologists that attend the scene of accidents and disasters alongside the police, paramedics and fire crews. I recently interviewed Teresa Pacheco, one of the founders and current members of the Madrid team, about her work for the latest issue of The Psychologist.

Could you tell us a little about the psychology emergency response team in Madrid?

The SAMUR-Protección Civil emergency services are part of the Madrid municipal government, and at first the service was just focused on physical health. However, in 1999 we saw the need for specialist attention in dealing with complex psychological situations, and so a team of voluntary psychologists was created within SAMUR, principally responsible for passing on bad news to relatives after traffic accidents.

Because of the evolution of emergency psychology and the success of the team, in 2003 the psychology emergency response team was formally created. It consists of six people, on call 24 hours a day, for any psychological emergencies that might occur. To ensure an effective and consistent response we have developed procedures for a range of diverse situations for which a psychologist might be required, including extreme anxiety reactions, overdose, communicating bad news, child abuse, sexual violence, multiple victim accidents and large-scale catastrophes.

I first read about Teresa and her team in a 2008 article for the Spanish daily El País so it was a pleasure to be able to interview her one-to-one.

However, there are also two other freely available articles in the current issue of The Psychologist, both of which are excellent.

The first is an important piece on the psychology of homelessness by Christian Jarrett and the second is on the history of blindsight, a neurological condition where affected patients have no conscious experience of vision despite being able to direct automatic behaviours based on visual information.

Link to interview with photos and layout.
Link to interview in plain web format.
Link to article on the psychology of homelessness.
Link to article on the history of blindsight.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist and my psychological emergencies usually involve losing the remote control.

Louann Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist who seems intent on bolstering sex stereotypes with poor science. Presumably in the service of promoting a new book, she has an article on CNN which attempts to explain ‘why men obsess over sex’ but which has lots of odd errors and strange unsubstantiated claims.

The thing that immediately struck me was in the initial paragraphs:

Our brains are mostly alike. We are the same species, after all. But the differences can sometimes make it seem like we are worlds apart.

The “defend your turf” area — dorsal premammillary nucleus — is larger in the male brain and contains special circuits to detect territorial challenges by other males. And his amygdala, the alarm system for threats, fear and danger is also larger in men. These brain differences make men more alert than women to potential turf threats.

Male and female humans are indeed the same species, but we are not a species which has a dorsal premammillary nucleus because it’s only been identified in the rat.

Furthermore, there is no reliable evidence that amygdala size differs between the sexes in humans and a recent study that looked specifically at this issue found no difference.

The rest of the article is full of Brizendine’s usual style which is to take a common stereotype of male or female behaviour and then to ‘explain’ it with a overly-simple, one dimensional and usually not directly tested brain explanation.

For example:

All that testosterone drives the “Man Trance”– that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts. As a woman who was among the ranks of the early feminists, I wish I could say that men can stop themselves from entering this trance. But the truth is, they can’t. Their visual brain circuits are always on the lookout for fertile mates. Whether or not they intend to pursue a visual enticement, they have to check out the goods.

Got that? Testosterone is responsible for men looking at breasts, perhaps even falling into an irresistible tit-driven trance, and we can’t help it. Are there any scientific studies on whether hooter staring is related to testosterone levels? (Sadly) No.

And there’s plenty more unlikely claims along similar lines. Apparently oxytocin is responsible for ‘nice’ grandpas whereas ‘grumpy’ grandpas can be explained by a drop in testosterone in later life.

Please make it stop.

UPDATE: Thanks to @willoller and Bergen who pointed out that the dorsal premammilliary nuclei have been identified in humans. Interestingly, however, I can only find one study which has ever investigated it in humans and nothing which suggests it is a “defend your turf” area. This conclusion seems entirely drawn from rat studies (e.g. this one) and what Brizendine seems to be doing, in this and other recent articles, is taking findings from rat studies and talking as if they were directly relevant to humans which is dubious to say the least.

Link to awful ‘Why men obsess over sex’ article (via @sarcastic_f)

This study should cause all sorts of public policy head scratching and hair pulling but will undoubtedly be ignored. It suggests that motherhood, not marriage, reduces the chances of disadvantaged young women getting involved in drug use and delinquency.

A special award to the first politician to argue that young women should be getting up the duff rather than married for the benefit of society, and full marks to the first one that realises that such complex social problems can’t be solved by simple solutions whether that be marriage, pregnancy or whatever else is flavour of the month (Americans: ‘up the duff’ is British slang for ‘blessed with child’).

Motherhood and criminal desistance in disadvantaged neighborhoods

Criminology, Volume 48 Issue 1, Pages 221 – 258

Derek A. Kreager, Ross L. Matsueda, Elena A. Erosheva

Evidence from several qualitative studies has suggested that the transition to motherhood has strong inhibitory effects on the delinquency and drug use trajectories of poor women. Quantitative studies, however, typically have failed to find significant parenthood or motherhood effects. We argue that the latter research typically has not examined motherhood in disadvantaged settings or applied the appropriate statistical method. Focusing on within-individual change, we test the motherhood hypothesis using data from a 10-year longitudinal study of more than 500 women living in disadvantaged Denver communities. We find that the transition to motherhood is associated significantly with reductions in delinquency, marijuana, and alcohol behaviors. Moreover, we find that the effect of motherhood is larger than that of marriage for all outcomes. These results support the qualitative findings and suggest that the transition to motherhood—and not marriage—is the primary turning point for disadvantaged women to exit delinquent and drug-using trajectories.

Link to summary and DOI entry for study.

Murder sprees by grudge-bearing, gun-toting killers have become a tragic feature of modern society although owing to the thankfully rare occurrence of the incidents, little is known about the sort of person who decides to embark upon this sort of deadly rampage. An article just published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law reviews what we know about such people.

It must be said that the article spends a lot of time on the rather interpretive ‘psychodynamics’ of mass shooter personality and less on more systematic evidence, but largely, it seems, because there is very little of the latter.

However, it’s also worth saying that forensic psychology and psychiatry in the US has traditionally been, and remains, much more heavily influenced by Freudian theories than in Europe and so these sorts of analyses are not quite so unusual as they might seem.

The two introductory paragraphs to the paper note the main points and dispel some myths with regard to mass shooters (please note, I’ve removed the numerical references for ease of reading).

The term pseudocommando was used by Dietz in 1986 to describe a type of mass murderer who plans his actions “after long deliberation”. The pseudocommando often kills indiscriminately in public during the daytime, but may also kill family members and a “pseudo-community” he believes has mistreated him. He comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons and has no escape planned. He appears to be driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment, in addition to having a paranoid character. Such persons are “collectors of injustice” who nurture their wounded narcissism and retreat into a fantasy life of violence and revenge. Mullen described the results of his detailed personal evaluations of five pseudocommando mass murderers who were caught before they could kill themselves or be killed. He noted that the massacres were often well planned (i.e., the offender did not “snap”), with the offenders arriving at the crime scene heavily armed, often in camouflage or warrior gear, and that they appeared to be pursuing a highly personal agenda of payback to an uncaring, rejecting world. Both Mullen and Dietz have described this type of offender as a suspicious grudge holder who is preoccupied with firearms.

Mass killings by such individuals are not new, nor did they begin in the 1960s with Charles Whitman. The news media tend to suggest that the era of mass public killings was ushered in by Whitman atop the tower at the University of Texas at Austin and have become “a part of American life in recent decades.” Research indicates that the news media have heavily influenced the public perception of mass murder, particularly the erroneous assertion that its incidence is increasing. Furthermore, it is typically the high-profile cases that represent the most widely publicized, yet least representative mass killings. As an example that such mass murderers have existed long before Whitman, consider a notorious case, the Bath School disaster of 1927, now long forgotten by most. Andrew Kehoe lived in Michigan in the late 1920s. He struggled with serious financial problems, and his wife suffered from tuberculosis. He appeared to focus his unhappiness and resentment on a local town conflict having to do with a property tax being levied on a school building. After becoming utterly overwhelmed with resentment and hatred, Kehoe killed his wife, set his farm ablaze, and killed some 45 individuals by setting off a bomb in the school building. Kehoe himself was killed in the blast, but he left a final communication on a wooden sign outside his property that read: “Criminals are made, not born”—a statement suggestive of externalization of blame and long-held grievance.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘pseudocommando’ article.

While we tend to think that the recognition of false confessions is a relatively new development but The Lancet discussed the phenomenon of ‘auto-accusation’ as far back as 1902.

The article discusses the types of people falsely confessing to notorious crimes in early 1900s Paris.

“Auto-accusation” is a curious phenomenon which possesses both medical and legal interest. The committal of a notorious crime which excites popular imagination and which remains undetected for a time often leads to the appearance in law courts of self-accusing culprits who charge themselves with being the authors of the crime in question. Dr. Ernest Dupré of Paris in a paper read before the Annual Congress of French Alienists and Neurologists recently held at Grenoble attempts to delineate with exactitude the psychological nature of “auto-accusation” and to show that certain morbid elements play an important part in it.

He points out that “auto-accusation” is not often or merely the result of a weak-mindedness; the subject of it is a person who has positively developed general ideas of unworthiness, guilt, and remorse, and in a word is suffering from mild melancholia with vague delusions of guilt and sin. Another type of self-accuser is the proud and vain “degenerate” who with a brain warped by congenital anomaly of development constructs romances of which he readily persuades himself to be the hero or the martyr.

There is, adds Dr. Dupré, a marked contrast between these two types. The one is abject, lowly, self-humiliating; the other proud, egiostic, and vain. Among other types of the same abnormality are found persons of alcoholic or hysterical character. The alcoholic self-accuser is one whose delusion generally has its starting-point in nocturnal or morning hallucinations occurring in a state between sleeping and waking. The physical and mental characters associated with alcoholism permit such cases to be readily recognised and they are almost invariably observed in adult males. The female self-accuser is rarely seen in the law court and she is usually the subject of a marked hysteria.

These would now both be described as ‘voluntary’ false confessions, which can involve both people who are looking for notoriety and those who may believe they are responsible owing to mental health problems impairing the ability to make sense of reality.

These are in contrast to a ‘coerced-compliant’ confession – where someone knows that they’re innocent but takes the rap for whatever reason, and a ‘coerced-internalised’ confession, which can result from the accused starting to doubt their own memory and judgement and start to believe they were responsible, often due in part to high pressure interviewing techniques.

The piece was found via the occasional ‘100 years ago’ section of the British Journal of Psychiatry that picks out interesting items from a century hence.

Link to original article in The Lancet.

Time magazine has a short article on the history of ideas about whether animals can commit suicide. It starts somewhat awkwardly by discussing the recent Oscar winning documentary on dolphins but is in fact based on an academic paper on ‘animal suicide’.

Changes in how humans have interpreted animal suicide reflect shifting values about animals and our own self-destruction, the paper argues. The Romans saw animal suicide as both natural and noble; an animal they commonly reported as suicidal was one they respected, the horse. Then for centuries, discussion of animal suicide seems to have stopped. Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas deemed suicide sinful for humans and impossible for animals. “Everything naturally loves itself,” wrote Aquinas in the 13th century. “The result being that everything naturally keeps itself in being.”

In 19th century Britain, however, after Darwin demonstrated how humans evolved from animals, humane societies formed, vegetarianism and pets became popular, and reports of animal suicide resurfaced. The usual suspect this time was the dog. In 1845 the Illustrated London News reported on a Newfoundland who had repeatedly tried to drown himself: “The animal appeared to get exhausted, and by dint of keeping his head determinedly under water for a few minutes, succeeded at last in obtaining his object, for when taken out this time he was indeed dead.”

Of course, the article doesn’t answer the question of whether animals can end it all, but is a fascinating look at how the idea that they can has gone in and out of fashion.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mind Hacks reader Avicenna for pointing out that the full text of the academic article ‘The nature of suicide: science and the self-destructive animal’ is available online.

Link to ‘Do Animals Commit Suicide? A Scientific Debate’.

Spike Milligan was one of the best loved, most influential and least predictable of British comedians, not least because he experienced the highs and lows of manic depression which, on several occasions, led to his hospitalisation.

As a prolific writer Milligan often wrote about mental health and the book, The Essential Spike Milligan, has several of his sketches and poems on the topic.

The book also contains a gem of a letter that Milligan wrote to a student magazine where he expounds upon the difficulty of maintaining one’s mental health in the modern world in his trademark scattershot style.

To the Editor, Rag Mag, Gloucester College of Education, 1968

You say your mag is in aid of mental health! Dear Lad, there’s no such thing, if there was anybody in a position of power with any semblance of mental health do you think the world would be in this bloody mess? Young minds at risk is different. Anyone with a young mind is taking a risk – young means fresh – unsullied, ready to be gobbled up in an adult world bringing the young into the visionless world of adults, like all our leaders. Their world is dead – dead – dead, and my God, that’s why it stinks! They look at youth in horror – and say ‘They are having a revolution’, but what do they want? I say they don’t know what they want, but they know what they don’t want, and that is, the repetition of past mistakes, towards which the adult old order is still heading. War – armistice – building up to pre-war standards – capitalism – labour – crisis – war and so on. I digress.

Mental Health. I have had five nervous breakdowns – and all the medics gave me was medicine – tablets – but no love or any attempt at involvement, in this respect I might well have been a fish in a bowl. The mentally ill need LOVE, UNDERSTANDING – TOLERANCE, as yet unobtainable on the N.H.S. or the private world of psychiatry, but tablets, yes, and a bill for £5 5. 0. a visit – if they know who you are it’s £10 10. 0. – the increased fee has an immediate depressing effect – so you come out worse than you went in.

As yet, I have not been cured, patched up via chemicals, yes. Letter unfinished, but I’ve run out of time – sorry!

Regards,
Spike

Link to details of The Essential Spike Milligan.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has an archive interview from 1978 with Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who pioneered the consideration and treatment of the last stages of life as patients were dying of terminal illnesses.

Kübler-Ross is best known for her stage model of death and grieving that famously includes denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It has been heavily criticised although it’s true to say that many critics miss the fact that Kübler-Ross later disavowed that they are sequential psychological reactions and could appear at any time.

Despite this, the model was based on little except personal observation and insight, and seems unable to capture the messiness of genuine grieving. It did, however, act as a lens that concentrated the mind of the medical world on end-of-life care and, in this respect, has been hugely influential.

Kübler-Ross became famous after a 1969 article appeared in Life magazine. Entitled ‘A Profound Lesson for the Living’ it finds her discussing death with terminally ill young people, which, at the time, was a difficult and taboo topic.

The All in the Mind interview sees her almost a decade after her work was first widely publicised, and is full of what is now considered to be the received wisdom about dealing with dying patients.

This was exactly the point where Kübler-Ross’ star began to fade, however, largely due to her increasing interest in dodgy practices like spirit channelling and association with some guru-like figures of questionable moral standing.

An article from Time magazine in 1979 exposed her increasingly flaky approach to the topic (the last paragraph is high comedy) and was influential in her quiet rejection from the medical mainstream.

The 2002 documentary film Facing Death: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (a pain to get hold of but available on some torrent servers) captures her when she herself was slowly dying. It looks back on her remarkable and not untroubled life and finds her having difficulty adjusting to her own mortality.

Link to All in the Mind Kübler-Ross interview.

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

New Scientist has an interesting piece on several conditions somewhat clumsily cobbled together as disorders of ‘extreme empathy’ although it’s still a good read.

Ace t-shirt blogger Coty Gonzales turns out the be a cognitive neuroscientist in an interview for Hide Your Arms.

The Guardian have a video interview with evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar on social group size and social networking websites. No word on poking.

The latest research on using fMRI to ‘read’ subjective mental states, this time during memory recall, is expertly covered by Neurophilosophy.

The Economist discusses the latest advances in brain-to-machine connections. Great photo caption.

Food induced seizures. Neuroskeptic covers a case of a woman who had seizures triggered by eating.

Time magazine covers research finding that psychopaths show greater reward system and reward expectation-related dopamine release. This cued lots of vague musing on the personalities of psychopaths in the press.

A Carl Zimmer talk on his excellent book ‘Soul Made Flesh’ on the beginnings of neurology and neuroscience is available on C-SPAN.

Scientific American have released a feature article that isn’t locked behind a paywall. Read the piece on how the brain handles colours and contours before they change their minds.

The UN recently warned of the effects of drug dependence on developing countries and Addiction Inbox covered the debate. Lots of other good posts on AI recently.

BBC Radio 4 had a documentary on the human library, a scheme where instead of borrowing books, you borrow a person to have a conversation with.

Eight studies demonstrating the power of simplicity are covered by the excellent PsyBlog.

Reuters reports that a French reality TV programme recreated the Milgram conformity experiments. Replaces scientist with a Parisian waiter who tuts when the person doesn’t want to continue.

Reminders of disease primes the body and mind to repel other people, according to new research covered by the BPS Research Digest.

Wired Science cover a new neuroimaging study that aims to understand ‘Gulf War Syndrome‘.

Lip reading for the FBI. Sensory Superpowers covers the use of lip reading by the feds and how we all do it to some degree.

New Scientist discusses the use of torture and the future for interrogation.

During recovery, a brain injured man is building an astounding doll universe with himself as a central character, Henry Darger-like in its scope. The blog of the Marwenocol project has lots of detail.

Biologist Lewis Wolpert reviews Greenberg’s ‘Manufacturing Depression’ in The Guardian.

Science News report on a cross-cultural study finding that sharing money on the ‘ultimatum game’ is related to the extent to which the person lived in communities with market economies.

Kids prefer friends whose speech sounds similar to their own, regardless of race, according to research covered by Scientific American Mind.

Psychological Reports has a paper on graffiti addiction!

Some empirical evidence for the ‘extended mind hypothesis’ (we become our tools) is discussed by Wired Science.

The Times reports on the case of a researcher being sued for libel after criticising bogus lie-detector technology. Please sign the petition at LibelReform.org to keep libel law out of scientific arguments.

A bogus TV report of a Russian invasion panics Georgia, according to a report from BBC News.

The Guardian reports on protests in Colombia by people outraged by narco-soaps glamorising cartels.

Thoughts of randomness enhance supernatural beliefs, according to a research covered in a great post from Deric Bownd’s Mind Blog.

Nature has a freely available feature article that discusses recent debates about how functional brain scans should be used in court cases concerning people charged with murder and classified as psychopaths.

Brain scans that show an estimate of brain activity, such as fMRI, are widely used in forensic and medical research to understand whether offenders and psychopaths differ in how their brain processes information.

These studies usually rely on group differences, showing that, on average, brain activity occurs differently in offenders compared to non-offenders, patients compared to non-patients and so on.

Court cases, of course, attempt to decided whether a single individual is criminally responsible for his or her actions. Inferring individual differences from broad group averages is difficult, some say impossible but despite this, functional neuroimaging is being increasingly used in court.

The Nature article discusses the recent Jeanine Nicarico murder case where Brian Dugan was being charged (and later confessed to) with the young girl’s murder.

Controversially, and for the first time in the US, the court was permitted to see evidence from functional brain scans from neuroscientist Kent Kiehl related to Dugan’s diagnosis of psychopathy.

On 29 October, Kiehl participated in a ‘Frye hearing’ for Dugan’s case. Based on a 1923 ruling, the hearing determines whether scientific evidence is robust enough to be admitted. Joseph Birkett, the lead prosecutor in the Dugan case, argued that allowing the scans — the bright colours and statistical parameters of which are chosen by the researchers — might bias the jury. Some studies, prosecutors argued, have shown that neuroscientific explanations can be particularly seductive to the layperson.

The judge ultimately “cut the baby in half”, says Birkett. He ruled that the jury would not be allowed to see Dugan’s actual brain scans, but that Kiehl could describe them and how he interpreted them based on his research.

According to the article, the scans had a significant influence on the case and it has raised a heated debated about whether such evidence is possibly interpretable in legal terms.

Neuroscientists are typically harshly critical about lawyers’ enthusiasm for wanting to use less-than-clear cut technologies like ‘brain scan lie detectors’ in court.

However an article recently published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences was very critical of this attitude, noting that the court’s requirements were often different from science’s, and than even suggestive evidence could help fill out the overall picture, and hence it was up to the court to decide whether such evidence should be admissible, not scientists.

Nevertheless, these sorts of arguments raise the hackles of many researchers and neuroscientist Helen Mayberg is quoted in the Nature piece as saying “It is a dangerous distortion of science that sets dangerous precedents for the field”.

The article is great coverage of the particular case and an interesting look into how neuroscience research is being uncomfortably integrated into the legal system.

Link Nature article ‘Science in court: Head case’ (via @mocost).

I attended the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education yesterday to discuss “What is the potential impact of technology, such as computer gaming, on the brain?” alongside Baronness Susan Greenfield and we were pleased to be able to present to a packed committee room.

I’ve never met Greenfield before, who was a big influence on me when I decided to become a neuropsychologist, and it was a genuine pleasure to meet her in person.

We started off the talks and it turns out we agree on quite a lot. Greenfield doesn’t want to ban computer games or internet applications but feels parents should be more involved in their kids’ media use to guide them to use it safely and sensibly. She also feels that most kids use technology well and get benefits from it but is concerned about the few that might “fall through the cracks”, or as I would describe them, the few who are a high risk group for unhealthy use.

It seems we agree on the implications, and it was clear the Greenfield is motivated by a genuine concern for young people.

Her talk was sincere, very well delivered but unfortunately her argument was poorly lacking in terms of its scientific content, and I’m afraid to say, wouldn’t pass muster as an undergraduate thesis. This was not least because she discussed not a single study on the effect of games or the internet.

I started my talk by searching PubMed, the database of medical research, to show that there are more than 1,500 published articles in the medical literature that directly discuss computer games.

Many of these studies investigate the concerns she has about whether games might be affecting attention spans or whether online communication could be harming the social life of young people, but she seems unwilling to consider any of them. For someone who is leading the public debate on this issue I find this, at best, baffling.

Greenfield’s justification is entirely based on the idea that young brains are sensitive to their environment, which shapes their development, and so any risks from screen technology might cause significant and unwanted neurological changes. This is, of course, plausible but cannot be evaluated in isolation from the studies that have directly tested the idea.

While I agree with the justification, I’m afraid I found her model of how this might occur also lacking. Not least as it had unspecified and too-broad-to-be-plausible aspects such as dopamine release, caused by gaming, leading to a reduction in frontal lobe activity.

If you want to see my talk, I’ve put the slides from my talk online as a PowerPoint file and apparently, both sets of slides will appear on the website of the Institute for the Future of the Mind shortly, possible with video as the talks were filmed.

During the talk I made it clear that ignoring the evidence on this issue does a disservice to young people and discussed some of the key findings from the last few decades of research in this area – not least that action video games have been shown to improve cognitive function but that we should be concerned about content and age appropriateness (e.g. violence) and displacement of other activities (such as education, exercise and so on). I also discussed evidence showing that the internet seems to be benign or beneficial for the social lives of the majority of young people who use it.

Greenfield noted, however, that not all of her concerns are addressed by the studies I mentioned (for example, that computer games might affect the ability to use metaphor and understand abstract concepts) and that some, possibly unwanted, outcomes will just not be measurable. Even though I find some of her concerns a little far-fetched, she has a valid point on how we should be aware of the limits of what empirical research can deliver for complex social issues.

The discussion afterwards was lively and constructive. We had input from someone working on the Digital Economy Bill, a head teacher, a paediatrician, educationalists, a Lord who – against all my prejudices – clearly knew shit loads about computers and several people who just spoke from their experience as parents.

Afterwards, Greenfield invited everyone for a drink and was a funny and engaging host and I got the chance to thank her for inspiring me when I was starting out.

I have a different opinion of Greenfield after the debate, as I previously suspected she had been struck by reactionary technofear but was mistaken, as she does want children to benefit from technology. She obviously thinks a lot of internet culture is trash, but when you look at the constant stream of seemingly irrelevant in-jokes and funny cat videos, I can hardly blame her for this.

Nevertheless, I think her passion for helping young people has overtaken her obvious good sense as a scientist and a scholar on this issue, and I would join the call for her to write her ideas up for publication in a scientific journal both to clarify her position and to stimulate engagement with the large evidence base that she is currently unfamiliar with.

I have criticised Greenfield’s more alarmist public statements in the past, but with her passion and experience as a neuroscientist, a well-informed Baroness Greenfield would be a massive advantage to the debate on how we ensure children learn to manage technology to their best advantage.

ppt of slides from my talk.
Link to All Party Parliamentary Group description.

Full disclosure: The Institute of Psychiatry kindly helped fund my airfare and I wouldn’t have been able to attend without them, so many thanks for their support and belief in public and policy engagement.

I’m just about to go to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education to discuss “What is the potential impact of technology, such as computer gaming, on the brain?”.

It turns out Baroness Susan Greenfield will be talking first, followed by me, followed by a discussion with all in attendance.

After forgetting my tie and having to buy one from Tie Rack in Waterloo station, I am all ready to go. I’ll upload my slides afterwards and will report how it went.

H-Madness is a fantastic new blog on the history of madness written by professional historians with a clear passion for their work.

Although aimed at “university and college faculty, students, and independent researchers” it is written in a striaghtforward style and includes original articles, book and film reviews, as well as news about academic publications, events and talks.

There are occasionally posts in French or German, which, to be honest, I find a bit annoying as I can’t read them and they often look very interesting, although you’ll often find an English translation just below.

It’s a great read and makes a fine compliment to existing high quality history sites like the Advances in the History of Psychology blog and The Neuro Times.

Link to H-Madness (via Somatosphere).

Author Roald Dahl was particularly well known for darkly humorous children’s books that form a riotous part of almost every childhood in Britain. Less well known is that he also made some significant contributions to neurology, as detailed in a brief article for Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation.

The article is available online as a pdf and starts by noting that several of his books contain possible nods to neurological syndromes or fantastical fictional experiments.

These descriptions may hardly be termed “contributions”, but two personal tragedies certainly did lead to developments of clinical import. Whilst living in New York in 1960, Dahl’s son Theo, aged 3-4 months, was involved in a road traffic accident which caused some brain damage and secondary hydrocephalus [a dangerous problem preventing cerebrospinal fluid drainage in the brain], the latter requiring shunting. Problems with blocked shunts occurred. The family returned to England and Theo came under the care of Kenneth Till, a neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital (1956-80). Prompted by Dahl, and in collaboration with Stanley Wade, an hydraulic engineer, a new type of shunt valve was designed. Reported in the Lancet by Kenneth Till, under the rubric of “New Inventions”, the special characteristics were reported to be “low resistance, ease of sterilisation, no reflux, robust construction, and negligible risk of blockage”. The author acknowledged that the valve was “designed by Mr Stanley C.Wade… with the assistance of Mr Roald Dahl and myself”. The Wade-Dahl-Till (or WDT) valve became widely used.

Kenneth Till subsequently wrote a preface for a new edition of Valerie Eaton Griffith’s book entitled A stroke in the family, a manual of home therapy, wherein lies another Dahl connection. In 1965, Dahl’s first wife, the American actress Patricia Neal, suffered a stroke due to a ruptured intracranial aneurysm, one of the consequences of which was marked aphasia, a potential career-ending misfortune for an actress (her illness and recovery are recorded in a book by Barry Farrell). Dahl appealed to Valerie Eaton Griffith, who lived in the same village, for help. With Dahl, she devised a rota of volunteer carers to engage the patient in conversation and hence to stimulate language recovery. This approach, different from formal speech therapy, was documented in Griffith’s book (initially published in 1970, with an introduction by Roald Dahl). It earned the approbation, as “treatment of a surreptitious character”, of no less a neurological figure than Macdonald Critchley, and still has advocates today. It has been suggested that Patricia Neal’s aphasia may have influenced Dahl’s creative processes, for example in the neologisms of The BFG (1982).

The EEG unit at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital is called the Roald Dahl EEG Unit but I’d never made the connection before.

Dahl was not the first father to be motivated to create a shunt to treat his child. As we discussed previously, engineer John Holter found himself in a very similar position and invented the Holter shunt to treat hydrocephalus in his daughter.

pdf of article on Roald Dahl’s neurological contributions.