Author: vaughan

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.

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.

I was surprised to find out that as well as being the patron saint of love, St Valentine is also the patron saint of epilepsy. I’ve just found a study that analysed six centuries of artistic depictions of the holy figure where he is often accompanied by people having seizures.

The paper has a good description of St Valentine’s historical association with what was known as the “falling sickness” or “the sacred disease”. This link to the condition may be based on little more than the fact that his name sounds like the old German word for fall.

In Christianity, saints were of great significance in the treatment of severe and chronic illnesses, as their intercession with God was considered to have a great therapeutic effect on human ailments. In some illustrations of SV [Saint Valentine], the aspect of exorcising demons in connection with epilepsy is depicted as a demon flying out of the mouth of a sick person [see image on left].

Of the more than 40 named “epilepsy saints” (among others, Aegidius, Anastasia, Antonius, Cosmas, Cyriacus, Damian, John the Baptist, Ladislas of Hungary, Veit, Zeno), SV was the most well known and he was the saint who was invoked most often. Today, we can no longer verify whether his patronage was based on the phonetic use of his name with the word fall, as Luther had suspected, or on an incident in his legend (SV is said to have healed a person with epilepsy).

Two saints with the name Valentine were and are worshipped in the Roman Catholic Church: Valentine of Terni, patron saint day February 14, and Valentine of Rhaetia, patron saint day January 7. Valentine of Rhaetia is one of the patron saints of the Passau/Bavaria and Chur/Switzerland dioceses. People with epilepsy are portrayed in illustrations of both Valentine of Terni and Valentine of Rhaetia.

It is likely that two saints with the name Valentine had their patron saint day on February 14. Although the two SVs are sometimes entered separately in martyrologies and biographies, most scholars believe they are the same person. The patronage is complex, as SV’s help is invoked not only against diseases of cattle and pigs, but also against a host of human ailments, such as diseases of the uterus, gout, and, most notably, fainting, madness, and epilepsy. The use of pigs as attributes in illustrations of SV leads us to assume that there is also a reference to the description of the “healing of the demoniac of Gadara” (Mark 5:1–19; Lucas 8:26–40; Matthew 8:28–34). This passage in the Bible is interpreted as the curing of a person who possibly had epilepsy…

In medieval German language, the “falling sickness” was sometimes referred to as “St. Valentine’s illness, St. Veltin’s infirmity”.

The article is full of wonderful historical illustrations of St Valentine surrounded by or curing people with epilepsy, but sadly the article is locked behind a pay wall.

Link to PubMed entry for St Valentine art and epilepsy study.

The Culture and Cognition blog covers the territory where culture and psychology meet, and they’ve just released their ‘reader‘ which has a list of essential books and papers to cover the interface between anthropology and the cognitive sciences.

Many of the articles are available in full online and the list is a fantastic guide to the area.

It includes both popular and academic texts but the list works best as a reference, so bookmark it as I’m sure you’ll be returning to it time and again if you’re like me and interested in the cross over between culture and psychology.

Link to Cognition and Culture Reader.

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

The University of California has an interview with space psychiatrist Nick Kanas

There’s a thoughtful consideration of the recent New York Times article on whether depression has evolutionary benefits over at Neuron Culture.

Time magazine discusses research finding that deaths from cocaine overdoses rise even when the weather warms up only slightly.

We’re slower at processing touch-related words than words related to the other senses, according to new research covered by the BPS Research Digest.

Wired UK discusses a new study on how electrical brain activity recorded from the scalp’s surface is enough to support the (rough) reconstruction of 3D hand movements on a computer.

The bizarre double life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted is discussed in a book review over at The Neuro Times.

The Neurocritic welcomes yet another attempt to resurrect Freudian ideas about the brain with a new paper taking the ‘but looks at the similarities!’ approach.

Male batterers consistently overestimate rates of domestic violence, according to a study covered in e! Science News

Not Exactly Rocket Science on how cooperative behaviour spreads through social networks, but so does cheating.

Asking an experienced stranger predicts our future happiness better than we can ourselves. A nugget from a piece on the work of Daniel Gilbert over at Harvard Magazine.

Neurophilosophy discusses some new lab research suggesting that the immune system response to brain infection may trigger Alzheimer’s disease.

The somewhat chilling piece on the rise of ‘human flesh search engines’ in China is discussed by The New York Times.

Deric Bownd’s Mind Blog covers a fascinating study that found thinking about randomness enhanced belief in the supernatural.

The UK’s programme to detain and treat people with ‘Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder’ is heavily criticised in a government report. New Scientist covers the story.

Seed Magazine asks ‘is there an evolutionary basis for our religious beliefs?’ I for one know that my belief in Thor makes me more attractive to the ladies.

Bigger men are more aggressive when drunk, according to research covered by Science News.

Neuroanthropology discusses why students drink before even leaving the door to party, a practice known as ‘pre-gaming‘. The site also has an excellent essay on how obesity is discussed as a medical problem.

A variant of gene SCN9A has been linked to pain perception, according to a new study covered by Science News.

The Loom discusses how bacteria could change our behaviour. I expect to see ‘the bacteria made me do it’ defence in court cases some time soon.

Fat may be detectable as a ‘sixth taste‘ suggest a new study covered by Wired UK.

Newsweek thinks fMRI “proves” addiction is a brain disease (hello neuroessentialism fallacy!) while making an otherwise important point on the need for psychological treatment for addiction.

A long but interesting piece on how to train teachers with simple effective classroom techniques appeared in The New York Times.

RadioLab discusses “a rare but disturbing delusional disorder called Capgras” in one of its excellent short broadcasts. Although it’s not actually that rare in people with psychosis and dementia.

Apologies if updates are a little irregular, as I’m currently on my way back to the UK for a three week visit. This is largely because I’ve been asked to speak to the ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education’ about the evidence for whether computer games are damaging kids’ brains. I kid you not.

I shall also use the opportunity to catch up with the fantastic research group I’m associated with at the Institute of Psychiatry, but I’ll largely be sleeping on sofas, floors, buses, park benches and the like, so do forgive any irregularity or incoherence (although regular Mind Hacks readers seem quite well accustomed to both by now, and for some of you, I suspect it’s part of the attraction).

Cannabis smokers often report that when stoned, their thoughts have a free-wheeling quality and concepts seem connected in unusual and playful ways. A study just published online in Psychiatry Research suggests that this effect may be due to the drug causing ‘fast and loose’ patterns of spreading activity in memory, something known as ‘hyper-priming’.

Priming is a well studied effect in psychology where encountering one concept makes related concepts more easily accessible. For example, classic experiments show that if you see the word ‘bird’ you will react more quickly to words like ‘wing’ and ‘fly’ than words like ‘apple’ and ‘can’ because the former words are more closely related in meaning than the latter.

In fact, it has been shown that the more closely related the word, the quicker we react to it, demonstrating a kind of ‘mental distance’ between concepts. Think of it like dropping a stone into a pool of mental concepts. The ripples cause activity that reduces in strength as it moves away from the central idea.

‘Hyper-priming’ is an effect where priming happens for concepts at a much greater distance than normal. For example, the word ‘bird’ might speed up reaction times to the the word ‘aeroplane’. To return to our analogy, the ripples are much stronger and spread further than normal.

The effect has been reported, albeit inconsistently, in people with schizophrenia and some have suggested it might explain why affected people can sometimes make false or unlikely connections or have disjointed thoughts.

As cannabis has been linked to a slight increased risk for psychosis, and certainly causes smokers to have freewheeling thoughts, the researchers decided to test whether stoned participants would show the ‘hyper-priming’ effect.

The experiment used a classic ‘lexical decision task‘ where the volunteers are shown an initial word (‘time’) and then after a short gap are shown a nonsense word (‘yipt’) and a true word (‘date’) at the same time and have to indicate as quickly as possible which is the real world.

The experimenters altered how related the initial word and true word were to test for the semantic distance effect, and also varied the gap between the initial word and the test to see how long the priming effect might last.

Volunteers who were under the influence of cannabis showed a definite ‘hyper-priming’ tendency where distant concepts were reacted to more quickly. Interestingly, they also showed some of this tendency when straight and sober .

Cannabis also had the effect of causing temporary psychosis-like distortions as would be expected from a psychedelic drug, but the smokers did not make more errors and were not more likely to report psychosis-like symptoms when sober, suggesting the effect was not due to general mental impairment and couldn’t be explained by underlying tendency to mental distortion.

Although the debate is not completely settled, there is now good evidence that cannabis causes a small increased risk for developing schizophrenia particularly when smokers start young. In fact, additional evidence on this front was published only this week.

The researchers discuss the possibility that long-term smokers who spend a lot of time in a chronic ‘hyper-primed’ state might make psychosis more likely by loosening the boundaries of well-grounded thought, although exactly how cannabis raises the risk of psychosis, and indeed, how exactly it affects the brain, is still not understood well-enough to make a firm judgement.

Link to PubMed entry for cannabis ‘hyper-priming’ study.

A brain scanning technology called MEG is being used to track the function of unborn babies’ brains as they grow inside the womb until after they’ve been born.

The full name for MEG is magnetoencephalography and it works by reading the magnetic fields created by the electrical signalling in the brain.

One of the advantages is that it can be used at various angles, doesn’t require the person to be in a cramped space, and is less sensitive to movement, so is ideally suited to scanning babies.

This includes unborn babies and with a bit of modification, as illustrated in the picture, researchers can pick up signals from the fetal brain in response to flashes or light or sounds.

We discussed the use of fMRI to scan the fetal brain previously, but this is a remarkable study that scanned the brains of babies inside the womb, every two weeks from week 27 until delivery, and then once after they were born.

Clearly, unborn babies are not the best at doing tasks set by experimenters, but there are various tests that just require the individual to experience changes in what’s presented to them.

One is called the auditory oddball task, where a series of tones are played that can either be similar (‘beep beep beep’) or can have include an ‘oddball’ (‘beep beep boop’). The brain is very good at picking out differences and the oddball is known to reliably trigger brain signals related to detecting changes.

This was the exact task used with the babies and the researchers looked to see if they could pick out a brain reaction to the ‘oddball’.

They found that they could detect this response 83% of the time in unborn babies, and that the reaction to the ‘oddball’ increased in speed throughout pregnancy. The newly born babies showed the response every time without fail.

This is an impressive finding as it shows how the brain development of the unborn child can be tracked over time with a brain scanner.

In a recent review article that discusses the development of this technology, the same group of researchers suggest that these and similar techniques could help track how different conditions in the mother affect the developing brain and even how the brain begins to develop its understanding of speech sounds before birth.

Link to PubMed entry for MEG study of developing fetus.
Link to PubMed entry for review article on fetal MEG.

Neuroskeptic covers a fascinating case of a man born with a genetic mutation meaning he had a severe lifelong deficiency of both serotonin and dopamine.

The case report concerns a gentleman with sepiapterin reductase deficiency, a genetic condition which prevents the production of the enzyme sepiapterin reductase which is essential in the synthesis of both dopamine and serotonin.

The most widely recognised symptoms of the condition, linked to the deficiency in dopamine which has an important role in controlling movement, are problems coordinating both conscious movements and the unconscious control of muscles that allows simple actions. Unconscious control requires that the brain signals one muscle to contract while releasing the complementary muscle, and problems with this process cause spasticity.

The effects the condition on serotonin, often stereotyped as the ‘happy chemical’, are less well known, but in this case it was clear that the patient wasn’t depressed but did some other difficulties:

These included increased appetite – he ate constantly, and was moderately obese – mild cognitive impairment, and disrupted sleep:

“The patient reported sleep problems since childhood. He would sleep 1 or 2 times every day since childhood and was awake during more than 2 hours most nights since adolescence. At the time of the first interview, the night sleep was irregular with a sleep onset at 22:00 and offset between 02:00 and 03:00. He often needed 1 or 2 spontaneous, long (2- to 5-h) naps during the daytime.”

After doctors did a genetic test and diagnosed SRD, they treated him with 5HTP, a precursor to serotonin. The patient’s sleep cycle immediately normalized, his appetite was reduced and his concentration and cognitive function improved (although that may have been because he was less tired)…

Overall, though, the biggest finding here was a non-finding: this patient wasn’t depressed, despite having much reduced serotonin levels. This is further evidence that serotonin isn’t the “happy chemical” in any simple sense.

This is another piece of evidence against the common myth that depression is “caused by low serotonin” although Neuroskeptic speculates whether the link between disrupted sleep and depression may indicate an effect of serotonin dysfnction.

Link to Neuroskeptic on ‘Life Without Serotonin’.
Link to summary of scientific paper.

There are numerous forms of body distortions and out-of-body experiences reported in the neurological literature but this is the first case I’ve found of someone who experienced tics that seemed to occur in external objects.

The report was published in the journal Neurology in 1997 and concerns a man with Tourette’s syndrome, a condition of persistent tics.

These more commonly appear as almost irresistible repetitive movements that the person feels compelled to complete, but occasionally they can appear as what are known as ‘sensory tics’ which are repetitive sensations such as feelings of pressure, tickle, warmth, cold, or other abnormal sensation in skin, bones, muscles, and joints.

In this case, however, the sensations felt as if they were appearing in external objects:

A 34-year-old man dated the onset of his symptoms to age 5 when he developed a compulsion to bite down on cups and glasses. The drive was so irresistible that he once shattered a glass in his mouth. He later began having painful repetitive neck extension and shoulder shrugging. During childhood, he first noticed itchy or pressure sensations, usually deep in a joint, but sometimes on the skin, in his hands, feet, and arms. The sensations eventually spread. For a period of time, the inside of his knees and ankles were particularly affected and the sensation could only be relieved by banging his ankles together. Noises including grunts, sniffs, and loud shouts began during early adolescence. A period of coprolalia was present briefly. The tics came to involve the entire body. He had associated difficulty concentrating, compulsions, and obsessions. He was given a trial of clonidine without relief. He was never tried on other medications.

The patient characterizes his motor tics as voluntary movements performed in response to the “itchy” feeling. Although he can partially suppress tics in any given location, suppression enhances the feeling that he must move another body area. He frequently has the urge to repeat what others say to him but can usually suppress it. Beginning during childhood and persisting through adulthood, the patient noticed that the itchy sensations preceding motor tics could arise in other people or in objects.

The extracorporeal sensations are associated with the need to scratch or touch the itchy item in a particular way. External sensations most frequently arise in angles, corners, and points of objects such as elbows, the edges of tables, or the edge of his computer screen. Out-of-body sensations are more likely if the patient is touching an object but can also arise without direct contact. When younger, the patient would act on the accompanying urge and would scratch his sister’s elbow. He is able to resist touching other people.

Disembodied sensations are not uncommon after neurological difficulties (for example, a recent case study of a person with epilepsy reported a feeling of complete disembodiment) and can even be induced in you and me, as the ‘rubber hand illusion‘ demonstrates.

In this case, however, it isn’t clear exactly how the Tourette’s syndrome is triggering the feeling that the sensations appear in other objects, although it does suggest that our self-other boundary is not as iron-clad as we sometimes like to believe.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

Go Cognitive is an awesome free video archive of interviews and discussion that aims to explain some of the core topics in cognitive neuroscience.

It’s a project of the University of Idaho who’ve managed to convince some of the leaders in the science of the brain to talk about their work.

There are videos on fMRI, neuroplasticity, attention and neurological problems to name but a few, and there’s even a talk on psychology and stage magic.

The website also has a demo section that demonstrates some of the principles in action.

My only complaint is that you can’t download the videos, they can only be streamed, but nevertheless they remain a fantastically produced high quality series. Bravo.

Link to Go Cognitive videos (thanks Peter!).

Every year the US Army holds an annual conference called the “Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar” that considers blue sky ideas for the future of warfare. Wired’s Danger Room discusses the conference and links to an unclassified pdf summary of the meeting which contains this interesting paragraph about ‘neuro-cognitive warfare’:

In the far term, beyond 2030, developments in neuro-cognitive warfare could have significant impacts. Neuro-cognitive warfare is the mashing of electromagnetic, infrasonic, and light technologies to target human neural and physiological systems. Weaponized capabilities at the tactical level will be focused on degrading the cognitive, physiological, and behavioral characteristics of Soldiers. Its small size and localized effects will make it ideal for employment in urban areas. Such technology could be employed through online immersive environments such as 2d Life or other electronic mediums to surreptitiously impact behavior without the knowledge of the target.

I presume ‘2d Life’ refers to Second Life, but I could be wrong.

The first part is discussing the conventional development of warfare technology designed to target the nervous system, which is a long-established military tradition that has included weapons such as the rock, the poison-tipped arrow, the nerve gas shell and a new generation of hush-hush electromagnetic weapons.

The second part is a little more interesting, however, it implies that a certain form of stimulation embeddable in a popular game or internet service (I think they’re too shy too to say porn) might reduce cognitive performance by only a fraction, but when considered over a whole army, it could make a difference to the overall fighting force.

The scenario is a little bit science fiction (Snow Crash anyone?) but is an intriguing possibility given that only a slight change would be needed in an individual to justify its effect if it could be distributed over a wide enough population.

For example, many priming studies have shown it is possible to influence behaviour just by exposing people to certain concepts.

In one of my favourite studies, exposing people to ideas about elderly people slowed their walking speed, while a more recent experiment found this effect could change action sequences as well.

Link to Danger Room coverage of ‘Mad Scientist Seminar’.
pdf of unclassified military summary.

Wikipedia has a page on the idea that blood type predicts personality, a discredited theory that nevertheless remains widespread in Japanese and Korean popular culture.

The idea seems to hold a similar cultural position as star signs and astrology and is used as a platform for discussing relationship compatibility and vague personality characteristics.

This is from a 1998 article from the Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology:

For example, in Southeast Asia, one can find many ideas about personality ranging from typologies based on blood types, horoscopes and fortune telling of various kinds, to personality theories similar to the “Big Five“. For example, since World War II, it has been popular in both Japan and Korea to classify people according to their blood types and elaborate theories of the qualities and characteristics of people with type A, B, AB, or O blood. Type A people, for instance, are considered to be serious and ordinary and type Bs to be unique and “going my own way.” Young Japanese commonly exchange this information about themselves and make predictions about the course of their relationships based on this information.

The Wikipedia notes that many Japanese video games often list the blood types of the characters, presumably to reflect their presumed personality.

Link to Wikipedia page on blood type and personality beliefs.
Link to summary of cross cultural personality article.

Designer Emilio Garcia has created a series of skate decks decorated with fantastic cortex graphics.

It means every time you boardslide, you can see exactly how your brain has been lesioned.

Garcia is the same designer we’ve featured before on Mind Hacks, where we discussed his unusual jumping brain model.

Link to Garcia’s brain pattern skate decks.

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

Time magazine reports on how darkness can encourage dishonest acts even when anonymity is accounted for.

A study finding a link with aversion to inequality an activity in the ventral striatum is brilliantly covered by The Frontal Cortex.

The Point of Inquiry podcast has an excellent discussion on the psychology of cold reading.

A preview of a special journal issue on ‘Neuroscience, power and culture’ is covered by Advances in the History of Psychology.

The Globe and Mail covers a study finding that children highly sensitive to stress can excel given the right support and environment.

Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses judging happiness and the paradox of experience vs memory in a talk for TED.

Neurophilosophy covers two new studies finding that face recognition ability is partly inherited.

“As for the effectiveness of gay conversion, Core’s Dr Davidson acknowledges that there are ‘relapses’”. Damn those Speedos. The Irish Independent has an article on gay conversion therapy in Ireland.

The Neurocritic has a thoughtful response to the recent NYT article on the possible cognitive benefits of depression.

‘Ministrokes‘ may cause more damage than thought, according to research covered by Science News.

The Neuroskeptic has an excellent piece on the decline and fall of the cannabinoid antagonists, a class of drug supposed to be the next big thing in treating obesity.

Research finding that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased in every region investigated is discussed in The Scientist.

Dr Petra looks at the background to the recent report on sexualisation and young people from the UK government with more analysis to follow. After reading the report, I can’t help but suggesting someone point out the difference between correlation and causation to its author.

A hay fever medicine that showed early promise as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease does nothing to stave off dementia, a large clinical trial concludes. Coverage from the New Scientist blog.

The Philosopher’s Zone programme from ABC Radio National has a good discussion on perception, sensation and consciousness with Nicholas Humphrey.

There’s a video profile of an ex-narc who catches bent cops framing people for drugs offences over at Boing Boing.

New Scientist discusses whether brain scans could gives us an objective measure of the intensity of pain.

The excellent Addiction Inbox blog contrasts how the media covers harm reduction services (‘they promote drug abuse’) and what the scientific studies say (the opposite).

io9 discusses research finding that oxygenated booze gives you less of a hangover. No word on how it affects the beer goggles effect.

UK may end its controversial “dangerous and severe personality disorder” program, according to excellent In The News.

Current Biology has a freely accessible paper on ‘archaeogenetics‘ – the use of genetics to understand human history.

Eric Barker’s Barking Up the Wrong Tree blog is full of fascinating and off-beat psychology snippets.

Mental Nurse blog has a funny post classifying types of annoying psychologists, occupational therapists and the like in mental health.

There’s a video interview with neurophilosophers Pat and Paul Churchland over at The Science Network.

Women with hour-glass figures activate the neural reward centre of the male brain, according to a study covered by the BPS Research Digest. Women with eye-glasses, even better.

BBC News discusses the cult of Omega-3 and why your life’s problems will not be solved by fish oil, despite that the advertisers will tell you.

The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films 1926-1972.

When they were drunk, bigger men became especially aggressive when given the opportunity to administer electric shocks to a fictitious opponent in a laboratory contest, according to research covered by Science News

Neuroanthropology links to videos from The Encultured Brain conference which are now available online.

“Only occasionally do studies come out that improve the image of men as more than stubborn, violent and incorrigible beasts with malfunctioning moral compasses. The study I’m about to talk about isn’t one of them.” Neuronarrative on a study of male and female guilt.

The Research Blogging Awards finalists have been announced and there’s much mind and brain goodness inside. I had the pleasure of judging the the English and Spanish language entries.

A new study has looked at the reliability of fMRI brain scanning results over time, finding that the same experiment will only only be moderately reproducible when conducted at two different times, suggesting that fMRI is much less reliable than most researchers assume.

The authors of the paper are the same ones who brought us the study showing that it’s possible to find ‘brain activity’ in a dead fish if the analysis is done in a way that is common but prone to false positives.

The paper will shortly appear in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences but they’ve put a copy online and, although it’s a scientific article, it’s remarkably easy to read.

They review all the studies to date on what is known as the ‘test-retest reliability‘ of fMRI. This refers to the ability of a measure to give reproducible results.

For example, if you’re measuring an adult’s height you want to make sure that your tape measure gives you similar results each time you use it on the same person. Of course, you may have readings that vary by a millimetre or two each time, but if you get wildly different results on Monday and Tuesday, you probably want to bin your tape measure.

In fMRI there are two types of results. One is ‘where in the brain’ and the other is ‘how strong’ is the activity.

We can examine the first by looking at how well the active brain areas overlap in scans taken at two different times, and we can examine the second by looking at the similarity of the strength of the results using a statistical test like a correlation.

The better the overlap and the statistical relationship between the results from the same test on the same people at different times, the more we can rely on our measurement technique.

This new analysis reviewed all the previous studies that have looked at the test-retest reliability of fMRI and found that overall, active brain areas overlap about 30% of the time and the correlation for the strength of the activity was about 0.5. To get some perspective a result of 1 would indicate perfectly reliable and reproducible results while a result of 0 would indicate no reliability at all.

An overlap of 30% and a correlation result of 0.5 shows fMRI has moderate reliability, but is much poorer than most people assume.

However, this overall result is perhaps a little too broad, and the authors make the point that the reliability varies depending on the type of scanner being used, what test is being carried out by the participants, what brain areas are being investigated and how the results are analysed.

Indeed, a recent study on the test-retest reliability of fMRI studies of the ‘reward system’ found the reproducibility of the results to be worse than this general figure while another study found an auditory detection task produced better results.

The authors conclude:

One thing is abundantly clear: fMRI is an effective research tool that has opened broad new horizons of investigation to scientists around the world. However, the results from fMRI research may be somewhat less reliable than many researchers implicitly believe. While it may be frustrating to know that fMRI results are not perfectly replicable, it is beneficial to take a longer-term view regarding the scientific impact of these studies. In neuroimaging, as in other scientific fields, errors will be made and some results will not replicate. Still, over time some measure of truth will accrue. This chapter is not intended to be an accusation against fMRI as a method. Quite the contrary, it is meant to increase the understanding of how much each fMRI result can contribute to scientific knowledge.

Link to full text of paper (via @hysell).

This morning’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s brilliant In Our Time was dedicated to the infant brain and has a wide ranging discussion about how ideas about the early development of the child developed into the modern age of neuroscience.

The streamed version will be available on the website permanently, but if you want to download the podcast you only have a week to do so from this page.

Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain.

For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.

Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate.

Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn’t differentiate themselves from their environment.

The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies’ perception of the world began as a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol.

More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds.

Link to In Our Time ‘The Infant Brain’ (thanks Petra!)

William Stewart Halsted is known as the ‘father of American surgery’ and was widely-known to have been addicted to both cocaine and morphine for large stretches of his life. I always assumed this was due to recreational sampling of the medicine cabinet but it turns out it was the rather unfortunate result of some initially serious scientific experimentation.

I just found this article on Halsted from The Annals of Surgery that explains the astounding and tragic story.

Halsted’s career changed dramatically on October 11, 1884, when he read in the Medical Record a report of the Ophthalmological Congress in Heidelberg. Dr. Henry D. Noyes, who had attended the conference, reported that the most notable event at the Congress was a demonstration of the extraordinary anesthetic power that a 2% solution of muriate of cocaine had on the cornea and conjunctiva when it was dropped into the eye. Later in his report, he was prophetic in his summary that “it remains, however, to investigate all the characteristics of this substance, and we may yet find that there is a shadow side as well as a brilliant side in the discovery.”

After reading this report, Halsted quickly obtained cocaine and began a series of experiments on himself, colleagues, and medical students that led to the development of local and regional anesthesia. Through a series of brilliant experiments, Halsted showed that virtually every peripheral nerve in the body could be injected with cocaine so that its peripheral distribution was anesthetized entirely and thus rendered insensitive to surgical interventions. This, of course, was of particular interest to dentists, and in 1922, shortly before his death, his priority in being the first to show the anesthetic properties possible with local infiltration of nerves was established by the National Dental Association. Unfortunately, during the process of these experiments, Halsted and several of his colleagues became addicted to cocaine. Only Halsted and Dr. Richard Hall, who moved subsequently to Santa Barbara, California, for his rehabilitation, survived. The rest died of their addiction.

Halsted’s only publication on local and regional anesthesia appeared in the New York Medical Journal in 1885. This article is a rambling, incoherent paper that is a testament to the addicted debilitated state that Halsted had reached. The first sentence of that article reads as follows: “Neither indifferent as to which of how many possibilities may best explain, nor yet at a loss to comprehend, why surgeons have, and that so many, quite without discredit, could have exhibited scarcely any interest in what, as a local anesthetic, had been supposed, if not declared, by most so very sure to prove, especially to them, attractive, still I do not think that this circumstance, or some sense of obligation to rescue fragmentary reputation for surgeons rather than the belief that an opportunity existed for assisting others to an appreciable extent, induced induced me, several months ago, to write on the subject in hand the greater part of a somewhat comprehensible paper, which poor health disinclined me to complete.”

Link to PubMed entry for article.
Link to full text at PubMed central.

The March edition of The Psychologist has just appeared online and has two freely available articles: one article investigates whether women really suffer a reduction in mental sharpness during pregnancy, and another interviews baby psychologist Alison Gopnik about her work.

This idea that pregnancy causes a slight reduction in mental sharpness, sometimes known as ‘baby brain’ or ‘pregnesia’, is widespread but the results from scientific studies are mixed, and at best show only a negligible effect:

We’ve seen that whilst many women report experiencing cognitive difficulties during pregnancy, objective evidence for a link between pregnancy and cognitive decline has been inconsistent. This begs the question: does the memory deficit, if it exists, matter? Is there sufficient cause for women to worry about it? On the other hand, if there is no deficit, should we be doing more to combat what amounts to a pervasive sexist myth?

Crawley says that even if there is a real deficit, it’s nothing to worry about. ‘In a previous study of mine, before I gave women the standard questionnaire comparing their cognition now to before they were pregnant, I asked them to tell me about the kinds of changes they’d noticed about themselves since they’d become pregnant. Out of 198 women, only three spontaneously mentioned cognitive changes, so I don’t think they’re very salient.’

The interview with Alison Gopnik, is, as always, thoroughly engaging and largely riffs on themes from her new book The Philosophical Baby.

Link to Psychologist article ‘The Maternal Brain’.
Link to interview with Alison Gopnik.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist and I worked as a baby early in my career.

Seed Magazine has a great short article on misperceptions and counter-intuitive findings concerning alcohol and drinking.

The piece covers whether alcohol break-down product acetaldehyde plays as much a part in drunkenness as alcohol itself, misperceptions about the chances of women having their drink spiked to facilitate sexual assault, and mothers’ perceptions about their kids future drinking patterns.

Alcohol is so embedded in most cultures that perceptions and reality intermix in surprising ways. Last week psychologist Polly Palumbo discussed a 2008 study about mothers’ beliefs about their own kids’ drinking. You might think that if mothers were concerned about their young children becoming drinkers in high school, they might be more successful in preventing some of the kids from actually engaging in underage drinking. In fact, the study, led by Stephanie Madon and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found the opposite. Mothers who worried their children might become drinkers had kids that were significantly more likely to drink.

The researchers are careful to point out that the study is just a correlation; we can’t say that the mothers’ belief about drinking is what caused their kids to drink. But because the study was administered over several years, it’s better than many correlational studies: We know the belief preceded the drinking, so it’s pretty much impossible that the kids’ drinking behavior itself led to the belief.

Link to Seed article ‘A Sober Assessment’.