Tom Stafford's Blog, page 142

Fake smiles can be done with feeling

[image error]The 'Duchenne smile' is thought to be a largely unfakeable expression of pleasure that involves a signature 'crinkling around the eyes' caused by automatic muscles. A new study covered by PsyBlog pours cold water on this popular idea by reporting that most people can produce undetectable fake smiles that involve these supposedly involuntary movements.

It has been suggested that 80% of us are unable to conjure up a fake smile that will trick others because we don't have voluntary control over...

Junk brothers

[image error]The fascinating story of the Collyer Brothers, the 'Hermits of Harlem, is recounted in an article the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

The two brothers became famous owing to them living in a chaotic home in New York City, although both met a tragic end as a result of their accumulation of junk:

Most famously, over decades they had filled the huge brownstone with possessions, newspapers, and just plain junk. After their deaths in 1947, over 130 tons of material was...

Mickey's amphetamine adventure

[image error]Drug information site Erowid recently posted a 1951 Disney comic where Mickey Mouse and Goofy take speed.

In the strip, 'Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man', Mickey and Goofy discover a new medicine called 'Peppo' which is clearly meant to represent amphetamine. Their enthusiasm for the chemical pick-me-up leads them to become salesman for the product in Africa.

Although the idea of Disney characters taking speed seems rather incongruous these days, in 1951 amphetamine was legal and widely...

Brain sand

[image error]Taken from the Wikipedia entry on 'brain sand':

Corpora arenacea (or brain sand) are calcified structures in the pineal gland and other areas of the brain such as the choroid plexus. Older organisms have numerous corpora arenacea, whose function, if any, is unknown. Concentrations of "brain sand" increase with age, so the pineal gland becomes increasingly visible on X-rays over time, usually by the third or fourth decade. They are sometimes used as anatomical landmarks in radiological...

Treating people like animals

[image error]The New York Times has an important article about how animal cruelty is being increasingly recognised as part of a wider pattern of behaviour including anti-social violence and criminality.

Cruelty to animals has been implicitly recognised as being a sign of behavioural problems in children for some time as it forms part of the diagnosis of conduct disorder, characterised somewhat glibly as 'kiddie psychopathy'.

However, research has been slowly accumulating over the last few years that animal ...

Take two there theres and call me in the morning

[image error]A curious definition from the Concise Medical Dictionary from Oxford University Press:

pithiatism (noun) the treatment of certain disorders by persuading the patient that all is well.

Forced smile

[image error]Neurology journal Brain had a wide-ranging review of the book 'Insomnia: A Cultural History' last year which has this wonderful part about Darwin, Duchenne and how he electrocuted the face to study emotional expression.

In the same era and acting on the same beliefs, many experiments were done to study the effect of electricity on sleep and on the nervous system. Beard and Rockwell (1871) claimed that the tendency to insomnia could be removed by electricity, thus galvanizing and causing...

2010-06-11 Spike activity

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

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A new study finds that superstitions improve performance by increasing confidence. Some excellent coverage from Not Exactly Rocket Science and from Bad Science.

Time magazine reports the counter-stereotype finding that men are more susceptible to emotional ups and downs after relationship break-ups than women.

Just too much 'technology is rewiring our brains' silliness to link to but in the mean time 14 kids at an 'internet addiction' camp i...

A lucid insight into consciousness

[image error]New Scientist has an intriguing article on how the study of people who have been trained to have lucid dreams may help us understand the neuroscience of consciousness.

Lucid dreams are where the sleeper becomes aware that they are dreaming inside the dream. My first thought was that the combination of these and consciousness sounded a bit gimmicky but the justification seem like an interesting bit of lateral thinking with potentially valuable results:

Surprisingly, given the irrationality of...

Shamanic transit and the prehistoric hard-on

[image error]If you were ever wondering about the representation of the penis in prehistoric art and what this reveals about "the meaning of erection in Paleolithic minds", wonder no more. The study has already been done.

Male genital representation in paleolithic art: erection and circumcision before history.

Urology. 2009 Jul;74(1):10-4.

Angulo JC, García-Díez M.

OBJECTIVES: To report on the likely existing evidence about the practice of circumcision in prehistory, or at least a culture of foreskin...