Tom Stafford's Blog, page 117

A consciousness raising exercise

I've just discovered the fantastic Conscious Entities blog that is full of wonderfully insightful discussions about the science and philosophy of consciousness.

As well as covering established theories it also tackles new ideas and controversies as they appear, with the fantastic coverage of philosopher Peter Hacker's criticisms of just about everything in neuroscience and the subsequent backlash being a case in point.

Despite dealing with heavyweight issues, it's also quite playful and I loved this explanation in the About page:

One possible source of confusion is that some of the discussions here are presented as dialogues between two different characters. One of these, whom I think of as 'Blandula', after the Emperor Hadrian's verse addressed to his own soul, is represented by a sort of cherub, and is suspicious of reductive and materialist ideas: the other, ('Bitbucket', represented by an abacus) takes the opposite view. I hope this helps both sides to benefit from vigorous advocacy, but the two characters are merely figments of my imagination and I cannot supply email addresses for either of them.

Fun, smart, informative and, as far as I can make out, illustrated by the author.

 

Link to Conscious Entities (via @AlexKaula).

Urban thrall

RadioLab has just released a fantastic edition on how we become behaviourally enmeshed in cities and how they operate almost like independent organisms.

As always, the programme is like being wrapped in a shimmering fabric of sound and this edition looks at our relationship with the urban sprawl, from the link between the size of the city and how fast we talk, to how the infrastructure reflects the society that relies on it.

There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can't explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who's walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that's slipping away.

 

Link to RadioLab on cities.

What price sobriety (in vouchers)?

BBC Radio 4 recently ran a fascinating one-off programme called Sugaring the Pill on schemes that pay people to lose weight, get vaccinated or stay off drugs. Payment turns out to be particularly effective at keeping addicts clean and this caught my eye because it seems to go against some of the core scientific beliefs about persistent drug users.

The programme explores the ethics of payment programmes and the public's discomfort, particularly when applied to drugs, with handing out rewards for something we should perhaps be doing anyway.

Payment as treatment is known in the medical literature as 'contingency management' and has been found to be most effective in keeping heroin and cocaine addicts clean.

As the programme, and the research summary linked above, describe, a typical payment scheme will give a ticket for every clean urine test – usually starting with a small value like £1, and increasing by 50p each time.

Only when the patient has completed a whole series of clean drug tests, maybe after a month or two, can they exchange their tickets for shopping vouchers which they can spend in the high street.

The fact that these schemes are so effective is surprising, because they rely on abilities thought to be lacking or impaired in addicts – mainly the capacity to delay rewards and gratification.

There is now a host of research showing that addicts have problems with temporal discounting. We all have the tendency to judge future benefits as significantly less important than immediate ones but this seems to be enhanced in drug users who greatly overly prioritise rewards that arrive sooner.

Also, persistent drug use is widely believed to alter the brain's reward system so positive reinforcement (wanting benefits) becomes less persuasive than negative reinforcement (the desire to escape an unpleasant sensation).

Similarly, research suggests that in addiction, the desire to take drugs become less modifiable by our executive system and so less amenable to voluntary control.

So, for people who should be primarily motivated by immediate chemical rewards over long-term abstract benefits, a slowly accumulating shopping voucher scheme would be the last thing you would predict to have such a reliable effect on keeping people off the smack or blow.

I note this purely as a curious inconsistency and if you have any suggestions that might explain it, do add them in the comments.

The BBC programme is excellent, by the way, and is also available as a podcast.

 

Link to Sugaring the Pill info and streamed version.

Link to page with podcast (for four weeks).

Khat among the pigeons

All in the Mind kicks off a new three-part series on 'Cultural Chemistry' with a programme about the effects and politics of the stimulant khat which has an important place in several East African cultures.

The plant is used widely in Somalia, Ethiopia and Yemen and when chewed it causes a mild buzz owing to low levels of a naturally occurring amphetamine-like compound called cathinone.

Although originally rooted in Africa, the plant is available across the world although its legal status varies – from banned in the USA to completely legal in Britain.

It is used traditionally like coffee to perk people up and make them more chatty although it is often the subject of controversy because it has been linked with triggering psychosis and aggression in some people – although the scientific evidence is far from clear.

I managed to try khat once after I discovered it on sale at a grocery in Leicester. Although it did cause a slight buzz I was most struck by the taste as it is incredibly tannin-like, making the experience a little like chewing on a tea bag.

But as All in the Mind notes, as the plant is strongly linked to specific social settings, it's difficult to understand its effects without considering the environment in which it's taken and the programme does a fantastic job of exploring the complex mix.

Coffee is next up in the 'Cultural Chemistry' series which should be worth keeping an eye on as there might be something a little special later on. Also, there's more on the All in the Mind blog and a call for you to contribute your own recordings.

 

Link to All in the Mind Cultural Chemistry series on khat.

Link to more details and additional audio on the AITM blog.

It only exists if I can see colours on a brain scan

Bad Science has an excellent piece on the recent hot air from a researcher who claimed that brain activity differences between people with high and low sex drive proved that 'hypoactive sexual desire disorder' was 'a genuine physiological disorder and not made up.'

This strikes me as an unusual world view. All mental states have physical correlates, if you believe that the physical activity of the brain is what underlies our sensations, beliefs and experiences: so while different mental states will be associated with different physical states, that doesn't tell you which caused which. If I do not have the horn, you may well fail to see any increased activity in the part of my brain that lights up when I do have the horn. That doesn't tell you why I don't have the horn: maybe I've got a lot on my plate, maybe I have a physical problem in my brain, maybe I was raped last year. There could be any number of reasons.

But far stranger is the idea that a subjective experience must be shown to have a measurable physical correlate in the brain before we can agree that the subjective experience is real, even for matters that are plainly experiential. If someone is complaining of persistent low sex drive, then they have persistent low sex drive, and even if you could find no physical correlate in the brain whatsoever, that wouldn't matter, they do still have low sex drive.

One of the reasons why attempts to make problems of behaviour or experience seem 'biological' is that the concept is strongly linked to the idea that if something is a 'biological disorder' we are less to blame because we have less control over the symptoms.

This is daft, of course, because although biology uses less talk of free will and agency, it is really just another level of explanation.

The beauty of a captivating picture doesn't somehow disappear if we discuss the molecules of the paint and, in a similar way, discussing the interactions of neurons won't mean that the problem of free will no longer applies.

But the drive to try and eliminate free will is, in part, because of the stigma still attached to many types of problems. Instead of trying to tackle stigma we often try to misguidedly reclassify the object of the stigma.

It's like trying to fight racism by classifying a wider range of skin colours as white – it really misses the point and actually maintains the prejudice. In the same way, we should be working towards accepting all human difficulties, however they are most appropriately described by scientific theories, as valid and worthy of concern.

This does not mean all necessarily need to be classified and treated as medical disorders, but it does mean that we should respect the difficulties people face and think about constructive ways of helping ourselves and other people to tackle them.

 

Link to Bad Science on 'Neuro-realism'.

NeuroPod on 'bionic ears' and training neurons

The latest edition of the excellent Nature NeuroPod podcast has just hit the wires with discussions of cochlear implants, conscious control of individual neurons, the neuroscience of Parkinson's disease and the function of the blood-brain barrier.

The highlight for me was the section on 'bionic ears' or cochlear implants – the first mass produced neural implant that can help some forms of hearing loss.

As well as tackling the neuroscience of the devices, the programme also plays what it sounds like to have one, which is quite distinct from normal hearing.

There's lots more great pieces in this month's edition, so definitely worth catching.

 

Link to NeuroPod page.

mp3 of latest podcast.

A diagnosis of 'Strange and Inexplicable Behaviour'

The World Health Organisation's ICD-10 manual of diseases and health problems has a diagnosis of 'Strange and Inexplicable Behaviour' that gives, rather appropriately, no further explanation, except that it's classified with code R46.2

It is from Chapter XVIII of the ICD-10 which tackles 'Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified'.

It turns out that the whole of Section R46 is a bit of a gold mine:

 

R46.0  Very low level of personal hygiene

R46.1  Bizarre personal appearance

R46.2  Strange and inexplicable behaviour

R46.3  Overactivity

R46.4  Slowness and poor responsiveness.

R46.5  Suspiciousness and marked evasiveness

R46.6  Undue concern and preoccupation with stressful events

R46.7  Verbosity and circumstantial detail obscuring reason for contact

R46.8  Other symptoms and signs involving appearance and behaviour

 

Many thanks to my friend and colleague Jorge who pointed out this little known and under-appreciated diagnostic gem.

 

Link to ICD-10 chapter with section R46.

Ted Hughes On Thinking

Editor of The Psychologist and man about town, Jon Sutton, just sent me a fantastic monologue by poet Ted Hughes on the experience of thinking.

I've uploaded the piece to YouTube where you can hear Hughes' remarkable analysis in his own characteristic voice.

The piece is almost nine minutes long but in this part Hughes describes what psychologists would now call metacognition.

There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.

There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.

And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don't somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can't fish.

I have tried to find the origin of the piece but have come up with nothing and Jon says he originally recorded it from Jarvis Cocker's BBC 6music show but has no more details.

If you know any more about the piece, do add a note in the comments.

 

Link to Ted Hughes 'On Thinking' (massive thanks @jonmsutton).

2010-10-29 Spike activity

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

Two words: Zombie Neuroscience. Oscillatory Thoughts on the strange tale of how the author became one of the world's most sought after neuroscientists for the undead.

Scientific American on how graphic warnings on cigarette packets put off occasional smokers but heavy smokers react by taking even harder drags.

When people are faced with scientific research that clashes with their personal view, they try a range of strategies to discount the findings. Excellent BPS Research Digest interview.

Esquire has a feature article on amnesic patient HM. Neuroscience served with a 'Women We Love' gallery – what more could you want? I can hear some of you saying a 'Men We Love' gallery.

Do sisters make us happier? asks The Frontal Cortex.

The Guardian has an exasperated article about the rent-a-quote psychologists and pseudo-psychologists happy to spout all kinds of nonsense about troubled footballer Wayne Rooney.

There's a fantastic in-depth discussion about the role of cooking in human brain evolution over at Neuroanthropology.

The Boston Globe covers philosopher Peter Hacker's block rocking challenge to neuroscientists: make sense! There's an expanded piece where he attacks more sacred cows over at The Philosopher's Magazine.

This week's editor's selection from ResearchBlogging.org focuses on psychology and neuroscience posts.

Seed Magazine has an excellent article asking 'do smoking bans work?'

The misconduct case against Marc Hauser may be looking shaky, or it might not. Neuroskeptic covers the machinations.

The Science Show from ABC Radio National has a short but excellent discussion on how rational and human reasoning differ.

The official bloggers have been announced for the Society for Neuroscience conference and hardly any of them seem to have a blog. Fear not, Functional Neurogenesis has a list of both official and unofficial bloggers covering the event.

Newsweek has a good piece on how researching premature babies can help us understanding neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.

The excellent Addiction Inbox covers a new report by the UN on the world-wide use of synthetic highs and the 'designer drugs' trade.

Time has a photo essay by a photographer who has created a 'photographic conversation' with his autistic son.

The Encephalon mind and brain blogging carnival is back from the dead! You can read it over at Cephalove.

Discover Magazine has an excellent piece on consciousness, tinnitus ('ringing in the ears') and how it be treated by tweaking the brain's tone map.

Ace forensic psychologist Karen Franklin who normally blogs at In the News has started a new blog called Witness aimed at introducing people to forensic and criminal psychology.

New Scientist has and interesting illusion that aims to combine a perceptual distortion with a beauty perception quirk.

The text of the latest annual 'State of the Regiment' address to the US military PSYOP units is up over at the PSYOP Regimental Blog.

The Lancet has a critical essay on genetics, the media and claims that new psychological disorders are suddenly 'biological'.

What's the chance that a man's kids are not really his, biologically? Barking Up the Wrong Tree looks at the statistics.

The Atlantic has more images from the 'Portraits of the Mind' book on the history of depictions of the brain that we featured recently.

A handslide victory

If ever there was a scientific study destined for the Ig Nobel awards, this is it. The Economist reports on new research finding that searches for internet porn increased in states who backed the winning party in an election.

The study was inspired by the 'challenge hypothesis' which states that competition and dominance raise testosterone levels in males with an increased interest in mating following soon after.

The hypothesis has largely been confirmed in animals, but psychologists Patrick and Charlotte Markey decided to see whether the effect could be seen in humans after elections:

To do this they first used a web service called WordTracker to identify the top ten search terms employed by people seeking pornography ("xvideos" was the politest among them). Then they asked a second service, Google Trends, to analyse how often those words were used in the week before and the week after an American election, broken down by state.

Their results, just published in Evolution and Human Behavior, were the same for all three of the elections they looked at—the 2004 and 2008 presidential contests, and the 2006 mid-terms (in which the Democrats made big gains in both houses of Congress). No matter which side won, searches for porn increased in states that had voted for the winners and decreased in those that had voted for the losers. The difference was not huge; it was a matter of one or two per cent. But it was consistent and statistically significant.

Less sophisticated people would make 'hung like a donkey' jokes at this point, but I'm far too refined as I'm sure regular readers are aware.

If you want to see the research without the fig leaf of the mainstream media, the full text of the scientific paper is available online as a pdf.

 

Link to Economist article 'Rising to the occasion'.

Link to DOI entry and summary of paper.

pdf of full text of scientific paper.