Author: vaughan

Neurology journal Brain has a fantastic article on the close parallels between the effects of semantic dementia, a degenerative brain disease that causes the loss of memory for the meaning of words and objects, and the novel A Hundred years of Solitude where a magical disease affects villagers’ memory for ‘the name and notion of things’.

The novel is by the Nobel-prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and is famous for founding the magical realism style of fiction where fantastical things seem to happen in an otherwise ordinary world.

What is interesting about One Hundred Years of Solitude is that while the memory loss closely resembles the effects of semantic dementia, it was written before the condition was recognised by neurology.

Unfortunately, the article isn’t available online but this an excerpt from the article which captures the main themes:

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez created a literary depiction of collective semantic dementia before the syndrome was recognized in neurology. The memory plague section of the novel also provides an inspiring and human account of one town’s fight against ‘the quicksand of forgetfulness’.

Why does García Márquez envision a world in which people lose their ability to communicate the names of everyday things? He gives some insight into his use of magical realism in the opening lines of the novel, in which he describes the village of Macondo in its earliest days: ‘the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point’. With this description, García Márquez implies that the ability to assign a name to an everyday object is a defining human achievement that has developed over time. In this light, the insomnia plague forces Macondo villagers into a primitive state by robbing them of their ability to remember ‘the name and notion of things’.

Remarkably, García Márquez’s probing investigation of the power of words and everyday names leads him to a striking literary enactment of the clinical syndrome of SD [semantic dementia] and the problems faced by SD patients. His fictional characters, just like the SD patients discussed here, are acutely aware of the ‘infinite possibilities of a loss of memory’. Both patients and characters attempt to preserve semantic meaning in more permanent forms that are free from the devastating effects of a neurodegenerative process and a fantastical plague. As such, García Márquez achieves a masterful portrayal of SD not just in his description of the plague’s ravaging effects on semantic knowledge, but even more vividly in his account of the affected people’s ability to maintain hope through various coping strategies—to preserve their fragile self-identity in the pages of word lists and pocketbook diaries.

Link to PubMed entry for article.

ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live has a fascinating discussion with the author of a new book on nine famous hypochondriacs: James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol.

I’m not sure Daniel Paul Schreber is necessarily the best example of someone with hypochondria is he is famous for writing a personal account of being genuinely mentally ill and floridly psychotic. However, I’ve not read the book and the programme focuses on better known figures so I am open to being convinced (certainly his delusions included lots of beliefs about his body changing in curious ways).

Link to Late Night Live on hypochondria.

The engaging behavioural economist Dan Ariely has just become a columnist for Wired UK and in his first article he describes how the promise of performance-related pay often backfires leading people to do more but perform worse.

To see the effect of bonuses on performance, Nina Mazar (assistant professor of marketing, Toronto University), Uri Gneezy (professor of economics and strategy, University of California, San Diego), George Loewenstein (professor of economics, Carnegie Mellon, Pennsylvania) and I conducted three experiments. In one we gave subjects tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for example, to assemble puzzles and to play memory games while throwing tennis balls at a target. We promised about a third of them one day’s pay if they performed well. Another third were promised two weeks’ pay. The last third could earn a full five months’ pay. (Before you ask where you can participate in our experiments, I should tell you that we ran this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low.)

What happened? The low-and medium-bonus groups performed the same. The big-bonus group performed worst of all.

Link to ‘Bonuses boost activity, not quality’ in Wired UK.

Full disclosure: I’m a contributing editor to Wired UK. I have never received a bonus in my life, but if I do, I hope to spend it beautiful on women and fast cars, although, in reality, I will probably buy a laptop.

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

Sex addiction is a feminist victory, according to an article in Slate, apparently because it allows man shaming. Malevolence-based medicine rears its ugly head.

The BPS Research Digest covers research finding CBT-based self-help books might do more harm than good for people who worry a lot.

The public are asked for their opinion on the recent news that The Lancet retracts the Wakefield autism paper, by The Onion.

Neurophilosophy has an excellent piece on big news that the first evidence for navigation essential grid cells in the human brain.

Why does time fly by as you get older? NPR has a great segment that tackles the cognitive science of changing time perception with age.

Neuroskeptic has an excellent piece on a new fMRI scanning technique that manages 10 scans a second over a thin slice. If you’re not reading Neuroskeptic, you should be, it’s great.

Any Freemasonry in the family? The Independent has a piece on one man’s experience of trying gay ‘conversion’ ‘therapy’ in the UK.

The Economist looks to the February 10th release of the first draft of the new psychiatric manual, the DSM-V. Doesn’t mention that it is likely to unleash a bun-fight of biblical proportions.

Mind Hacks is a top 30 science blog according to The Times and a top 100 blog for psychology students according to News42. Shakira todavía no me ha llamado.

H+ Magazine covers the announcement that the next $10 million X Prize is for a brain-computer interface. I shall propose ‘fingers’ as my entry.

There’s a thought-provoking piece on whether racism is partly due to perceptual illusions over at The Vision Revolution.

Fora.tv has an excellent talk about the new book ‘The Harvard Psychedelic Club’ about how the psychedelic revolution emerged from the Harvard psychology department, based on the new book of the same name.

Reactive action is quicker action, according to research covered by Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Nature has an excellent short article on writer Jorge Luis Borges interest in neuroscience but it’s locked behind a paywall because this information can kill! It’s for your own good.

“We have buried Trials 15, 31, 56…” The Carlat Psychiatry Blog covers jaw-dropping evidence of drug companies Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca hiding evidence and lying about drug harm.

The Daily Mirror has a poor write-up but a genius headline over the recent internet and depression flap: “Does being inter the net bring you down loads?”

Is Telephony Making Us Stupid? Carl Zimmer’s The Loom covers Mark Twain’s article about the dangers of the telephone.

NPR has a good short piece on Haiti, imposing Western ideas about http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122981850&ft=1&f=1001″>trauma and how some treatment can do more harm than good.

Teaching abstinence makes teens delay sex? Dr Petra presents the evidence behind the media hype.

The Washington Post reports that the US Defense Department starts an investigation into military mental health care after an exposé by Salon.

A new London exhibition on the history of the ‘Bedlam’ hospital and the development of mental health care in the UK is covered by The Guardian. Only runs until February 12th.

In the News is a fantastic forensic psychology blog.

The founder of the Baby Einstein sues the university for access to raw data for a study reporting that the DVDs actually slowed language development, reports Advances in the History of Psychology.

The Times has just released its monthly science magazine, Eureka, with a special issue on the brain and all the articles freely available online.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to link to a whole issue, but inside you’ll find an excellent piece on the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily switch off bits of the working brain, a profile of neurosurgeon Huma Sethi, an article on commercial brain-computer interfaces, a remarkable piece on how old injuries can ‘return’ to affect phantom limbs as well as an exploration of the link between brain activity and sporting skill.

Probably my favourite is an article on how forensic science and criminology are increasingly using neuroscience, and there’s also an account of a writer’s experience of being brain scanned and a description of the Total Recall project which aims to digitally record everything about day-to-day life.

There’s also a piece by me, where I go to head-to-head with Baroness Susan Greenfield in the Fight Club section where we debate ‘Is screen culture damaging our children’s brains?’.

Greenfield goes for the usual “maybe.. perhaps… could it be?… tada! compulsive gambling and schizophrenia!” argument, so I hope I’m a little more evidence-based. Anyway, you can read for yourself.

I also debated exactly the same thing with psychologist Tracey Alloway live earlier today, and you can read the transcript here. It’s more in-depth but is less coherent and has typos and bad jokes.

Also don’t miss out on the fantastic downloadable brain poster, which is available online as a (big) jpg file.

I’m still reading through all the articles but the ones I’ve read so far have been excellent. A motherlode of neuroscience reading.

Bioemphemera has found some wonderfully left-field brain illustrations by Dutch graphic designer Rhonald Blommestijn. The image on the left is a brain made out of clocks.

Blommestijn’s blog is full of strikingly surreal eye-candy that manages both to inspire a feeling of wide-eyed wonder and illustrate scientific themes.

They’re certainly very original takes on the subject and the neuroscience images are particularly vivid.

Link to Bioephemera on Blommestijn’s brain illustrations.
Link to Blommestijn’s blog.

A study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports on how a subset of patients diagnosed as being in a coma-like state can be trained to show specific brain activity to answer yes / no questions despite seeming to be unconscious and unresponsive.

Many news reports seem to suggest that researchers have found a way of ‘reaching inside coma’ with a brain scanner to communicate with patients but the findings are much more modest, only 5 out of 54 patients could reliably produce specific brain activity on command and only one was tested who could answer simple yes / no questions in this way.

Despite this, the study is still incredibly impressive and it indicates that some patients who seem unconscious may have a much richer inner life than we assume and it may be possible to communicate with some of them by measuring their brain activity.

The researchers put people in brain scanners and, in one condition, asked them to imagine standing still on a tennis court while swinging an arm to “hit the ball” back and forth to an imagined instructor, and in the other, to imagine navigating the streets of a familiar city or to imagine walking from room to room in their home. These were chosen because they show distinct patterns of brain activity on a scan.

This was tested both on healthy people, for a comparison of how activity should normally look, and in brain injured patients in a coma-like state.

Only 5 of the 54 patients responded with distinct brain activity, similar to the type found in all the healthy comparison participants, but in this subset, it indicated that they were likely following simple verbal commands.

This has been established before, but one criticism of these past studies was this this could just be an automatic response to the words in the command. We know that the brains of unconscious people respond briefly but automatically to words, even the person is not aware of hearing them.

The brain activity for the ‘tennis’ and ‘walking’ commands was much longer and more sustained than we might expect from the normal automatic response to words, so this was unlikely, but you might still argue that these are automatic, non-conscious responses.

To rule this out in one patient, the researchers asked six yes/ no questions about simple personal details and instructed the patient to imagine tennis for yes and walking for no.

Crucially, during the questions, the researchers prompted the patient with just the word “answer?”, meaning any different reactions that showed up couldn’t be just an automatic response to the word itself which was always the same.

Out of these six simple questions, the patient ‘responded’ correctly to 5, suggesting that they were genuinely understanding, considering and making a conscious response. This was in a patient who had no external signs of consciousness.

The scans for a couple of the questions are in the image above (click for a bigger version). You can see how different the responses are, but also how serious the brain damage is.

Importantly, these correct answers do not necessarily mean that the patient was completely mentally fine but ‘trapped’ their body. One common test used on definitely conscious patients after brain damage asks lots of these yes / no type questions (like “Do cinemas show films?” / “Are bottles edible?”) to test understanding.

Some patients can be fully conscious but their language so damaged that they can’t answer these questions, others can manage the less complex ones (the easiest are usually simple personal details) but not others, for the same reason.

All of the patients in coma-like states were clearly very brain damaged, so it could be that even the one who could make conscious responses might not have full understanding. On the flip side, it could also mean that some of the other patients may have been conscious but could not understand the task, and so did not show up on this test. You can see it’s a tricky area.

However, the discovery that it is possible to communicate, even in a simple terms, with a patient previously though to be in a coma is huge news and this research is likely to lead to further work trying to detect which patients are conscious and to develop methods to communicate with them.

Link to study summary in NEJM
Link to good write-up from New Scientist.

Herb is a hip Berlin fashion label who have a fantastic collection of women’s clothing with a subtle brain scan motif.

The label is the work of designer Angela Herb and there are actually two collections inspired by the MRI scan.

It’s definitely a street wear collection but the clothes have a wonderfully understated futuristic feel.

Unfortunately, it seems like clothes are exclusively sold through boutiques in Germany so you may have to contact the label directly if you want to get hold of something from outside the country.

We occasionally feature mind and brain t-shirts on Mind Hacks but rarely anything this stylish.

Link to Herb collection one.
Link to Herb collection two.

Roman gladiators took part in one of the most brutal sports in history, many dying by traumatic brain injury during their matches. A medical study published in Forensic Science International examined the skulls of deceased fighters, discovered in a gladiator graveyard from Turkey, and reveals exactly how they died and even what weapons delivered the fatal brain injury.

The graveyard was discovered by archaeologists in 1993 but this study is the result of applying modern forensic medicine, which more typically attempts to discover the cause of death by looking at human remains after a crime, to the ancient bones.

Gladiator matches were not free for alls. Each gladiator had a certain attack and defence weapon combination, and these were matched between pairs of fighters so none had an unfair advantage. Men of equal, speed, strength and skill were also matched together to ensure a fair fight.

Since no point system existed, fighting was always pursued until a decisive outcome, which could be any of the following alternatives: defeat through death, defeat due to injury preventing further combat, defeat due to exhaustion, a win, with the bestowal of a palm branch or a laurel crown, or a draw, with both opponents being allowed to depart the Arena alive. This was the most unlikely case, since the superiority of one fighter had to be proved to enable the public to reach a verdict.

The final decision of the loser’s fate resided within the hands of the games’ organizer. To this end he appealed to the mood of the plebs. Upon the cry of iugula (lance him through), it was expected of the vanquished that he would set an example of the greatness of manhood (exemplum virtutis) and would motionlessly receive the death thrust. The turning down of the thumb signified to the spectators, not that the gladiator should be put to death, but rather that the gladiator was dead.

After the final blow, arena servants carried the combatant on a stretcher into the carcass chamber and gave the twitching body a deathblow. It is not known exactly how this execution was performed. The executor, a costumed arena servant, associated with the Roman god of death “Dis Pater” or the Etruscan counterpart “Charun” carried a deadly hammer accompanying the gladiator on his last journey.

The first task of the investigators was to work out whether the damage to the skulls was due to an earlier blow the fighter survived, the death blow, or whether the bones had been damaged since the fighter was buried.

Living bone contains fluid-filled vessels, grease, and collagen fibres, which makes it more durable, flexible and, most importantly, it doesn’t splinter when broken. This allowed the research team to work out which skull fractures happened at the time of death. Furthermore, any sign of fracture healing shows that the gladiator survived the injury.

Once this had been established the researchers could start to match up the deadly fractures with the types of weapon they knew existed at the time.

Two examples of skulls are on the right, with the likely weapons that delivered the final blow illustrated in the white boxes underneath – one a hammer and the other a trident. These were identified by looking at the unique damage patterns caused by the impact of specific weapons.

Out of the 10 skulls with deadly fractures, the cause of death in 7 was a puncture wound from weapons such as a trident, javelin, pointed hammer or sword, and, interestingly, three were caused by being hit by the blunt force of a shield.

Deadly blows were either over the frontal area (above the eyes and forehead) or the parietal area (above and slightly behind the ears), whereas all the blows that the gladiators survived were at the front of the skull.

The researchers suggest that this is because death blows were usually given after the gladiator had been beaten and so were more likely to be from behind, whereas survivable blows were more likely to occur in training where less deadly weapons were used.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘Head injuries of Roman gladiators’.

A new study has made headlines around the world that claim that internet use is linked to depression despite better evidence from previous studies that there is no substantial link.

The study itself is a fairly straightforward online survey with the key finding that out of 1,319 people who completed the questionnaires, 18 were identified as ‘addicted’ by Kimberly Young’s Internet Addiction Questionnaire and these people were more likely to score highly on the BDI – a standard questionnaire to measure depression.

The study itself was well conducted although it is not a surprising finding because Young’s Internet Addiction Questionnaire (which you can read online here) asks lots of questions about emotional distress, so it’s hardly surprising that people who say they’re distressed on one questionnaire will say they’re distressed on the other.

I have criticised the concept of internet addiction on the basis that the whole concept doesn’t make sense, but research has also shown that these ‘diagnostic’ questionnaires are not particularly reliable, meaning they not a good guide even to what they claim they’re doing.

But perhaps the most important point, is that this study is just one in a long line of studies that have looked at whether internet use is linked to changes in mood.

Recently, a type of study called a meta-analysis was published that looked at all of these previous studies to see what the overall effect was – in essence, a mathematical aggregation of all the reported findings to get at the big picture.

This meta-analysis found that there was a statistically reliable link between internet use and depression, but one so small as to be insignificant. In fact, it found that internet was responsible for between 0.02% and 0.03% of total changes in mood (stats geeks: the variance was not reported directly but I calculated it from the r by the coefficient of determination).

In other words, internet use explains so little of a person’s depression that it’s irrelevant. It’s like knowing that hypothermia is a serious medical condition and that drinking a glass of water reliably lowers body temperature, but by such a small amount as to be medically unimportant.

Interestingly, I am quoted in some of the news stories about the study. Actually, I was contacted by a BBC journalist and some other stories have seemingly just nicked the quotes (often wrongly describing me as a psychiatrist).

What’s curious is that I sent the BBC journalist a link to the meta-analysis, even explained what it found and what a meta-analysis is, and included comments about why the study doesn’t change the general conclusion.

Instead of focusing on the existing evidence, I am quoted as being a naysayer. I have not been misquoted but the most important scientific point is omitted at the expense of presenting my words. This seems to be a common pattern where news stories often privilege opinion over data, when science privileges data over opinion.

In fact, the motto of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific society, translates as “on the words on no-one”, but news stories often turn the hierarchy of evidence on its head, giving a skewed impression of the most fundamental way in which science works.

In this case, to suggest that science has established that internet use is strongly linked to depression when we know that it isn’t.

Link to PubMed entry for latest study.
Link to PubMed entry for meta-analysis.

Film-maker Noah Hutton has just released an excellent 15-minute documentary on the Blue Brain project that captures the team as they work and explains the goals of the ambitious attempt to simulate animal, and eventually, human scale neural networks on computer.

It’s an interesting look both inside the scientific mission and inside the mind of project leader Henry Markram, whom it must be said, is largely talking about the potential of the project rather than what it can do now.

It’s probably worth saying that Markram is not known for underselling his efforts, and some of his projections seem a little unrealistic.

At one point he mentions that the project could be used in hospital so doctors can simulate the effects of drugs on a digital brain to see if they’ll work before giving patients the real thing. Best of luck with that chaps.

It’s a great short piece, however, and apparently there are more to come in the future.

Link to Blue Brain: Year One.

On Thursday, I shall be taking part in a live debate hosted by The Times Online entitled ‘Is screen culture damaging our children’s brains?’ where I will be debating psychologist Tracey Alloway who recently made headlines by suggesting Facebook ‘enhances intelligence’ but Twitter ‘diminishes it’.

It one of those online chat things but you are welcome to sign up and take part. It happens at 1pm UK time which turns out to be far-too-early-o’clock Colombian time so I may be in my dressing gown. Don’t let that put you off.

An article on the same topic will also be coming out on Thursday which should help set the scene and which I’ll link to when it appears.

Link to ‘Is screen culture damaging our children’s brains?’ debate.

Slate has two articles on an innovative but controversial service in Vancouver, Canada, that provides injecting drug users with a place to safely inject drugs with clean equipment and medical staff on hand.

The project, ‘Insite’, is based on a ‘harm reduction‘ approach which is driven by the idea that users should be encouraged to take drugs in the safest way possible.

This is partly an admission that addiction treatment is not very successful on its own, but partly a public health measure in that injecting drug users have much higher rates of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis and are more likely to pass them on to other people.

It is also the case that one of the biggest dangers from injecting drugs is the actual practice of injecting, as unsanitary conditions, ad-hoc ‘cooking up’ and unpredictable street dope as become much more risky when the final product is injected into the bloodstream.

These services can be controversial in some places as they can be seen to be condoning drug use, although some countries are now going further and actually prescribing heroin to addicts.

One of the biggest impacts on society is not the fact that a tiny minority of people are damaging themselves with smack, but that they tend to commit crimes to feed their habit and support a violent criminal network of dealers.

Methadone is a heroin substitute that has been prescribed for years and we know that it can stabilise the lives of users and increase their chance of kicking the habit.

But it is often not what users want. It stops the withdrawals, as it’s another form of opioid drug, but it doesn’t feel the same and still has the danger of overdose. One common problem is known euphemistically in the medical literature ‘methadone diversion‘ where users sell their methadone to buy street drugs.

Several countries have trialled the prescription of heroin itself, with, it turns out, a great deal of success – including better health, a reduction in criminal activity and a higher chance of actually kicking the habit.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but one of the advantages of these projects is that the user is constantly in contact with health professionals who can provide addiction treatment.

The political and local opposition to harm reduction services is usually immense, however. Politicians want to be seen to be ‘tough on drugs’ and no-one, and I mean no-one, wants one of these clinics near where they live.

The Slate articles looks into the day-to-day running and talks to some of the clients of the Vancouver programme, and provides an insight into the challenges such services face. There’s also a gallery of photos that captures the project in action.

Link to Slate article ‘Welcome to Insite’.
Link to Slate article ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’.
Link to photos of the Insite project.

I just stumbled across this fascinating article from the Journal of the History of Neurosciences about the use of gladiators’ blood as a cure for epilepsy in Ancient Rome. Surprisingly, the practice continued into modern times.

Between horror and hope: gladiator’s blood as a cure for epileptics in ancient medicine.

J Hist Neurosci. 2003 Jun;12(2):137-43.

Moog FP, Karenberg A.

Between the first and the sixth century a single theological and several medical authors reported on the consumption of gladiator’s blood or liver to cure epileptics. The origins of the sacred or apoplectic properties of blood of a slain gladiator, likely lie in Etruscan funeral rites. Although the influence of this religious background faded during the Roman Republic, the magical use of gladiators’ blood continued for centuries. After the prohibition of gladiatorial combat in about 400 AD, an executed individual (particularly had he been beheaded) became the “legitimate” successor to the gladiator. Occasional indications in early modern textbooks on medicine as well as reports in the popular literature of the 19th and early 20th century document the existence of this ancient magical practice until modern times. Spontaneous recovery of some forms of epilepsy may be responsible for the illusion of therapeutic effectiveness and for the confirming statements by physicians who have commented on this cure.

The article has some amazing reports of how the practice continued into the last century:

In his autobiography, the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen reported a striking observation in 1823: ‘‘I saw a pitiful poor person made to drink by his superstitious parents a cup of the blood of an executed person, in an attempt to cure him from epilepsy.’’ At the public execution of a murderer in the provincial town of Hanau near Frankfurt in 1861, a crowd of women had to be prevented by police from dipping rags into the freshly-spilled blood. At about the same time executioners in Berlin were paid two taler per blood-drenched handkerchief.

A last and final dramatic report of this kind was published in a Saxon newspaper in 1908 after the execution of a murderess: ‘‘On the day of the execution an old woman from a neighbouring village pushed her way through the crowds around the court buildings to request a small amount of the delinquent’s blood from the security officials. She wanted to help a young girl related to her who suffered from epilepsy, as the blood of an executed person was believed to have great healing power against this disease’’ (quoted from Seyfarth, 1913, p. 279).

Link to PubMed entry for article.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Newsweek has an excellent article that charts the rise and fall of antidepressants from their status as a wonder drug that made people ‘better than well’ to the recent evidence that suggests for many people, they’re not much better than placebo.

The piece particularly follows the work of psychologist Irving Kirsch who was the first to conduct a meta-analysis of the effects of anti-depressants back in 1998.

Titled “Listening to Prozac but hearing placebo” it suggested that the drugs were hardly more effective than placebo and, for many, marked Kirsch out as a biased and dangerous ‘anti-psychiatrist’.

However, later studies in a similar vein by both Kirsch and others have supported his original findings and many countries have now changed their treatment recommendations as a result.

The Newsweek article tracks this story but also picks up on many important subtitles in the story, notably that the research doesn’t suggest that antidepressants are useless – quite the opposite – just that their effect is only in part due to their direct chemical effect; and that many patients in trials work out that they’re not taking placebo because of the side-effects and this realisation can trigger a stronger placebo effect.

It also integrates evidence from the recent STAR*D study, one of the most complete on the best methods to treat depression.

If you want a good overview of the debate on the effectiveness of these iconic drugs, this is a good place to start.

Additionally, if you’re interested in a good analysis of the most recent study in this area, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Neuroskeptic blog has a great write-up and analysis of what this means for the concept of depression itself.

Link to Newsweek piece on antidepressants (via @DrDavidBallard).
Link to write-up of JAMA study at Neuroskeptic.

BBC Radio 4 has just concluded a wonderful series on medical imaging that overs everything from the microscope, to ultrasound, to the brain scanner.

The series is five 15 minute programmes that tackles the technology and its controversies. The brain scanning programme is particularly good and shows both ends of the spectrum of enthusiasm for the use of functional brain scans to understand human nature.

Because of the BBC’s black hole of death archive, the programmes will start being sucked into the void in three days time, so do catch them before then.

The programmes also cover DNA imaging and X-rays and the website apparently has a gallery of images on but I have given up trying to find them on the dreadful Radio 4 website.

Link to ‘Images That Changed The World’ audio links.

Science isn’t sure whether fear can kill but several courts have been convinced and have convicted people for murder on the basis that they caused death through fright. An article just published in the American Journal of Cardiology summarises the eight murder trials.

The cases are not, as I first suspected, where someone had deliberately tried to kill someone else using fright as a ‘weapon’ (like in the infamous scene in Belgian serial killer mockumentary Man Bites Dog – clip here – warning: not pleasant).

Instead, they typically describe where someone has died of a heart attack in the midst of an armed robbery or assault, despite not being mortally wounded.

In a similar case, State v. Edwards,10 the defendant and his accomplices entered a bar in Tucson, Arizona and committed a robbery at gunpoint. Shortly after the robbers had fled, the proprietor experienced a heart attack and died. The defendant argued that the victim’s death was accidental and unintended and could not constitute murder. Moreover, the defendant maintained that the evidence was insufficient to prove that the robbery actually caused the victim’s death.

The court disagreed on both counts, finding first that accidental, unintended consequences could form the basis of a murder conviction. Second, the court pointed to the testimony of a pathologist that the death was caused by anxiety resulting from the robbery at gunpoint. The court held that this provided adequate evidence to support causation.

However, this is not the only area where supposedly being ‘frightened to death’ has caught the interest of psychologists. There is a small psychological literature on ‘psychogenic death’ that attempts to explore reports of death after curses, spells or violation of cultural taboos.

This is from an excellent brief article from 2003, published in the journal Mental Health, Religion & Culture:

Landy (1977, p. 327) describes the phenomenon as follows: ‘a process is set in motion, usually by a supposed religious or social transgression that results in the transgressor being marked out for death by a sorcerer acting on behalf of society through a ritual of accusation and condemnation; then death occurs within a brief span, usually 24 to 48 hours’. Ellenberger (1965) distinguishes acute from slow psychogenic death. In some cases, the death can be rapid, in other cases the process occurs over several weeks where the patient sickens and dies. There has been some doubt expressed as to whether voodoo death is part of ‘colonial folklore’ only based on anecdotal reports (Williams, 1928).

Lewis (1977, p. 11) asks, ‘Is it really the case that healthy people have died in a day or three days because they know they were victims of sorcery? Who has seen this happen with his own eyes? Is there no explanation for it but sorcery?’ Yap (1977) calls for concrete findings from anthropologists and medical field workers that can be appraised critically. Questions have arisen as to whether or not these victims had pre-existent pathological conditions predisposing them to death. There is however some direct evidence for its occurrence.

The evidence is not people just dropping dead, but from several documented cases where perfectly healthy people rapidly give up eating and drinking after being ‘cursed’ and dehydration leads to death.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘Homicide by fright’ article.
Link to DOI entry and summary for ‘psychogenic death’ article.

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

io9 has a great brief summary of a citation analysis that describe how neuroscience became a major scientific discipline in just one decade. Interestingly, it didn’t happen in the Decade of the Brain.

The ability to resist temptation is contagious, according a new study covered by The Frontal Cortex. I suspect this means I am patient zero of giving in to temptation.

Salon has an interview with psychologist Susan Clancy about her new book ‘The Trauma Myth’ on child abuse, which is likely to be both important and controversial. The comments are a mix of the insightful, angry and loopy.

This chap might have found a photo of Phineas Gage from before his injury.

Radio 4 has a good documentary on ‘Super Recognisers’ that will disappear off the face of the earth in only a few days if you miss your chance to listen to it.

The Prison Photography blog is excellent.

NPR has a brief segment on new evidence suggesting that heavy drinking in teenage years may have a lasting impact on the brain.

Special therapy bears work through mirror neurons (what else) according to a bizarre claim unearthed by The Neurocritic.

NeuroPod has just released a new edition covering optogenetics, AI cockroaches, stem and grid cells.

Does time dilate during a threatening situation? asks Neurophilosophy.

Science Daily reports that thinking of the past or future causes us to sway backward or forward on the basis of a new study.

C.G. Jung’s famous ‘Red Book‘ has finally been published and Brain Pickings has a fantastic review and preview.

The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry has launched a new podcast which is aimed at clinicians and is. a. bit. stilted. but sounds promising.

There’s a good piece about the new and not very effective female ‘sex drug‘ flibanserin in Inkling Magazine.

Horizon, the flagship BBC science programme, recently had an episode on the Big Pharma, medicalisation and disease mongering. Apart from some minor pharmacological dodginess (ADHD a ‘chemical imbalance’, Ritalin a ‘clever pill’) it’s excellent and features our very own Dr Petra. Torrent here.

A new study finding people’s personality is reflected in their internet use is covered by the BPS Research Digest. See also a new study finding social behaviour is similar both online and offline.

Quirks and Quarks, the excellent Canadian radio show, discusses kuru disease immunity in cannibals.

Why is there no anthropology journalism? asks Savage Minds.

The Economist covers a new study finding that the more widespread a language, the simpler it is, suggesting that that languages become streamlined as they spread.

Incoming! APA press release forewarns of imminent clinical psychology fight: psychodynamic therapy best says not yet published meta-analysis.

PsyBlog has an excellent round-up of 10 studies on why smart people do irrational things.

The secrets of looking good on the dance floor and research on the psychology of social dance is covered in Spiegel magazine.

Life magazine has a gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts.

The US is quietly abandoning the ‘war on drugs‘ according to an article in The Independent. Does this mean the expansion of military bases in Colombia is to be re-justified as part of a war on salsa music? Kids told to ‘just say no’ to fake tans and enthusiastic rhythm sections.

The BPS Research Digest reports the development of what could be the first anti-lie detector in neuroscience.

Bootleg Botox, a potent neurotoxin, could be a weapon of mass destruction according to a piece in the Washington Post.

Wired reports on the Jan 25th anniversary of the first recorded human death by robot which occurred in Flint, Michigan, 1979.

The marriage market and the social economics of high-end prostitutes are tackled in a new study discussed in Marginal Revolution.

The Psychologist has a completely fascinating article on how we perceive things to be more appealing, easier to handle and more efficient based on how simple they are to understand – even when this is based on irrelevant or superficial properties – like its name or the font it is described in.

The core idea is that we partly judge things on ‘processing fluency’, that is, how easy it is to immediately grasp something. This seems intuitive, as we tend to prefer things that make sense to us, but it turns out that this preference is also heavily influenced by surface features.

For example, the article discusses the surprising amount of work on how simply changing the font can change our opinion of what the text is describing.

When they were presented [with physical exercise instructions] in an easy-to-read print font (Arial), readers assumed that the exercise would take 8.2 minutes to complete; but when they were presented in a difficult-to-read print font, readers assumed it would take nearly twice as long, a full 15.1 minutes (Song & Schwarz, 2008b). They also thought that the exercise would flow quite naturally when the font was easy to read, but feared that it would drag on when it was difficult to read. Given these impressions, they were more willing to incorporate the exercise into their daily routine when it was presented in an easy-to-read font. Quite clearly, people misread the difficulty of reading the exercise instructions as indicative of the difficulty involved in doing the exercise…

Novemsky and colleagues (2007) presented the same information about two cordless phones in easy- or difficult-to-read fonts. They observed that 17 per cent of their participants postponed choice when the font was easy to read, whereas 41 per cent did so when the font was difficult to read. Apparently, participants misread the difficulty arising from the print font as reflecting the difficulty of making a choice.

The article contains numerous examples of how changing surface features, such as giving something an easy or difficult to pronounce name, alters what we think about it.

However, the piece also mentions that giving something difficult-to-process or unfamiliar features also means we scrutinise it more closely, which means we often pick up errors more easily.

This is is a wonderfully elegant example:

As an example, consider the question ‘How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?’ Most people answer ‘two’ despite knowing that the biblical actor was Noah, not Moses. Even when warned that some of the statements may be distorted, most people fail to notice the error because both actors are similar in the context of biblical stories. However, a change in print fonts is sufficient to attenuate this Moses illusion. When the question was presented in an easy-to-read font, only 7 per cent of the readers noticed the error, whereas 40 per cent did so when it was presented in a difficult-to-read font…

Link to Psychologist article on processing fluency.

Full disclosure: I am an unpaid associate editor and columnist for The Psychologist and I have an unfamiliar first name – draw your own conclusions.

British comedian John Cleese tackles the brain and gives a tour of the organ’s major anatomical landmarks in this short video from 2008.

It’s a tour de force of descriptive neuroanatomy and even the most experienced neuroscientist is likely to encounter much that is new and interesting.

It also finished on a short but important piece of advice that is worth bearing in mind in all lab situations.

Link to John Cleese on the brain (via @brainshow).