Being Human

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind has a powerful and moving programme on the experience of 'hearing voices' that meets with two young women with quite different experiences of auditory hallucinations.

One of the young women, Kat, has largely positive voices and has come to understand and work with them, while another, Mel, has an abusive and taunting voice that has clearly caused a huge amount of distress and impairment.

Mel's story is difficult to hear in parts and the programme starkly illustrates the range of experiences that accompany auditory hallucinations.

The piece also tackles current ideas and approaches to 'hearing voices', from the medical and scientific to the grassroots and social approach of the Hearing Voices Network.

There's also an equally powerful video interview on the AITM site at the link below.

Link to AITM on 'Hearing Voices: stories from the coalface'.

People probably imagine that the life of a linguistics professor is moderately dull. Think about language; sit at desk, type stuff; go to classroom, teach stuff; go to lunch, eat stuff; repeat… But no, in actual fact my life as a professor at the University of Edinburgh is one of thrills and excitement. Yesterday, after teaching my undergraduate class on English grammar in the David Hume Tower, I walked to the nearby Chrystal Macmillan building to hear a talk on phonology, and as I entered the building I realized there was something really special going on. Tea had been laid out in the public area of the ground floor; two security men lurked in the shadows; the room seemed tense, but somehow it was in a pleasant way; university people who were extremely smartly dressed were standing around, and all were looking in the same direction. I followed their gaze, and there, a few yards away from me, stood Annie Lennox.

That Annie Lennox. Possibly the most brilliant singer-songwriter and recording genius I could name. She was educated in classical music at the Royal Academy of Music, and I had admired her through the days when she was 50% of the Eurhythmics down to the extraordinary accomplishments of her more recent solo career. She is surely one of Scotland's greatest contributions to popular music. My old friend Pete Gage, with whom I worked in the pop music business many years ago, analyzes three different tracks of hers in his course on layering and texturing in record production at a college in Sydney, Australia, and he tells me that her album Bare has been in his CD stacker continuously since 2003.

Annie had been awarded an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh, conferred at a ceremony earlier yesterday afternoon. She was now about to go into a nearby large classroom to speak at a session of a conference on social-work aspects of AIDS care and launch the publication of a new report on the topic — this being the issue to which she has devoted her most serious public advocacy and humanitarian work (the honorary degree was probably awarded for this rather than for her musical creativity).

For a minute, I stood transfixed, just thrilled to be so near the woman who wrote, produced, and sang the extraordinary album Diva. It was a moment of genuine excitement. Too much excitement for one middle-aged blond woman to bear, apparently: she broke from the crowd of respectfully watchful academics and threw herself into Annie's arms and kissed her repeatedly. Annie coped with the situation very gracefully. Nonetheless, I elected not to risk doing likewise. I absorbed the experience of seeing Annie live in closeup, savoring the pleasure of the moment, and then turned away to slip downstairs and arrive slightly late at a presentation by Tatiana Reid on an undocumented Nilotic language, Thok Reel, spoken in the south of Sudan.

A language with a remarkable system of three vowel lengths, four tones, and three phonation types (laryngealized, murmured, and plain), which means, in non-technical terms, that there are 36 distinguishable ways to say bab. There are nouns for which the difference between the singular and the plural is signalled only by the difference between short and medium vowel length; and there are verbs for which the only difference between 1st person and 3rd person is the difference between medium and long vowel length.

Excitement piled on excitement.

PsychCentral.com
Baby Boomers Maybe Not Narcissistic
PsychCentral.com
... based on three decades of data from two groups of baby boomers, were published in the September issue of the journal Developmental Psychology. ...

Technology Review has a fantastic photo essay that tracks how we've visualised the brain from times past and includes some of the most stunning images from the last century of neuroscience.

It's been put together by Mo Costandi, the writer you may know from the Neurophilosophy blog, with each image concisely described so you can get an insight into exactly what you're seeing.

Link to 'Time Travel Through the Brain' photo essay.

Meeting of the minds: law students flock to psychology lectures
Harvard Law Record
And in the wake of the recent financial crisis, economists and lawyers have turned increasingly to behavioral economics and social psychology to understand ...

Psychology Today (blog)
Baby Boomers Find Fulfillment in Making a Difference
Psychology Today (blog)
My findings, based on long-term data from two groups of baby boomers, were published in the September issue of the journal Developmental Psychology, ...

With uncanny echoes of the modern interest in 'cognitive enhancers', a 1958 edition of Popular Science hails a new drug that "tunes up the brain" allowing us "to perform at peak efficiency all the time".

The drug is iproniazid, marketed then as Marsilid. It was the first ever antidepressant, but the concept of an 'antidepressant' had yet to be created by the pharmaceutical companies and instead it is described as 'psychic energizer'.

It was originally used a treatment for tuberculosis, as it stops the bacterial infection, but it was noticed that patients treated with iproniazid seemed to have a lift in mood at low doses and risked becoming confused and psychotic at higher doses.

At the time, the only widely used psychiatric drugs were tranquilisers, and the idea that a drug might be an 'anti-tranquiliser' was quite puzzling. It was trialled on some patients with diagnoses of mental illness patients and then marketed as a 'psychic energizer'.

According to David Healy's book (p66) on the history of drug treatments for depression, The Antidepressant Era, this label came from the discoverers trying to interpret its effects in Freudian terms - in which 'psychic' is used broadly to mean 'psychological':

Kline and Ostow speculated that as psychic conflicts all involved the binding of psychic energy in various different ways and as a great deal of ego energy went into binding instinctual (or id) energy down to produce a range of inhibited states, it was conceivable that a drug that took energy away from the ego might lead to liberation of instinctual energy - it might be a psychic energizer.

However, the drug was rapidly taken off the market as it was found to damage the liver to the point where a number of patients died of hepatitis.

The Popular Science article is interesting because it is remarkably similar to modern day articles on cognitive enhancers - relating it's effects to improving performance rather than treating an illness and musing over whether healthy people should take drugs to make them 'better than well'.

Therefore, let's imagine that a few years from now there is a psychic energizer known to be completely harmless. And suppose its effect on body chemistry is perfectly normal and natural. In that case, what about the healthy person who just want more vim and vigor to go dancing?

"Well", Dr Kline answers, "why not?" After all, nobody sees anything wrong about a dentist working to give perfect teeth. Why shouldn't a doctor try to give perfect metabolism?

Or perfect tits, as the comparison more commonly goes in the 21st century.

It's an interesting insight into how the drug companies were trying to find a place in the market for their puzzling new compounds in the 1950s and another demonstration of how concerns about 'cognitive enhancers' are as old as drugs themselves.

Link to Popular Science article 'New Drugs to Tune Up Our Brains'.

OMG! Texting and IM-ing doesn't affect spelling!
Washington Post
One report published in the March issue of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology said that children who use "textisms" on mobile phones may in ...

Psychology Today (blog)
The Grandad they never knew
Psychology Today (blog)
Developmental Psychology, 40, 217–233. 2 Harris, PL, & Giménez, M. (2005). Children's acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. ...

New Weapons in the War Between Willpower and Willy Wonka
Miller-McCune.com
... manner exhibited significantly less automatic positivity with regard to the product," researchers report in the European Journal of Social Psychology. ...

The 77th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival has just appeared online, this time ably hosted by Sharp Brains.

This edition is rather special as it's a crossing of the streams with the medical carnival Grand Rounds.

A couple of my favourites include Brain Blogger on whether religion can be understood as a natural phenomenon and Advances in the History of Psychology on some of the early experimental work on emotion.

There's many more links to great writing in the blogosphere so do head over and have a look.

Link to Encephalon 77.

In an earlier post, I observed that the phrase "the United States" — regardless of whether it is treated as singular or plural — seems to have become more likely, over time, to occur in subject position ("The United States as a subject", 10/6/2009).  My (admittedly slim) evidence for this hypothesis came from some searches in newspaper archives, where the process of gathering data is painfully slow, because I was forced to search interactively via a web interface, and to check out the grammatical status of hits by wearing out my eyes on the article images that are returned.

Historians may find this complaint churlish, since they're used to an even more painful process. Traditionally, scholars have needed to travel to the local of a physical archive, and to read every dusty document as a whole in order to find the relevant pages.  (Well, maybe in recent years the process might involve reading dusty microfiche cards in some slightly more convenient location.)  All I have to do is to open a web browser, run a text search to find the relevant articles, and examine the page images that are returned!

But yes, I'm still complaining.

That's because it's easy to speed the process up by several more orders of magnitude. Say that there are a thousand hits a year for each of 100 years, and it takes me a minute to scan each article returned for the characteristics of interest to me (here the grammatical role of the phrase "the united states"). That's 100,000 minutes, or 208 8-hour days, or about a person-year of work.

With full access to the underlying texts, a trivial program can pull out the relevant sentences or paragraphs (which already saves a lot of time).  A slightly less trivial program can categorize most if not all of the instances automatically, with an error rate that's likely to be better than that of human annotators doing the same tiresome task. And then, if I want to ask the same question about other words and phrases (e.g. France, Great Britain, Spain), or a related question about the same phrase (how does the distribution of prepositional uses change — of X, to X, by X, etc.?), this requires only a small change to the program and a little computer time, not another year of tiresome labor.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet managed to get my hands on the underlying text for any 19th-century newspaper archives.  But thanks to Jerry Goldman of oyez.org and Tim Stanley of justia.com, I recently got a nearly-complete archive of U.S. Supreme court opinions (and other related documents) in html form. After a bit of hacking, I wound up with 30,846 dated text files, from 1759 to 2005. (The documents in this collection from before 1789 are of course from other American courts. Those after 2005 are in a different format, which I haven't processed yet.)

The plan is to parse the collection, so that the correlations among grammatical and political histories can be conveniently explored.  Meanwhile, I decided to try a few small explorations where I classify the grammatical role of hits by hand, to evaluate both the plausibility of my grammatico-historical hypothesis  and the quality of my text preparation.  Note that this is already much less tiresome than reading web-archive hits, since I need only look at the relevant bits, which I present to myself in a "keyword in context" array that is relatively easy on the eyes.

So how does the United-States-as-subject hypothesis fare in the SCOTUS texts?

I started by checking out the 26 texts dated 1800, in which "the United States" occurs in 55 sentences (at least as my sentence-division algorithm judged things). One of these instances is in (conjoined) subject position, for a rate of 1.8 per 100 sentences:

4  37: The United States and the French republic are in a qualified state of hostility.

In the 39 texts dated 1810, "the United States" occurs in 144 sentences, of which 5 were in subject position, for a rate of 3.5 subjects per 100 sentences. For example:

10  53: The States of Virginia and Maryland having, in the year 1789, offered to the United States a cession of territory ten miles square for the permanent seat of government, the United States, by the Act of Congress of 16 July, 1790, vol. 1, p. 132, entitled "An act for establishing the temporary and permanent seat of the government of the United States," accepted the same and authorized the President to appoint certain commissioners for the purpose of carrying the act into effect.

In 1850, in 164 texts there were 1495 sentences containing "the United States".  I checked a random sample of 100 of these sentences, and found 7 instances of the phrase in subject position, for example:

49  451: Admitting that anything had occurred as you state, has not the United States received the same amount there from its land as it has elsewhere?

In 1900, in 232 texts there were 2154 sentences containing "the United States", and in a random sample of 100, I found 7 subjects, e.g.

179  494: And as the United States does not complain of the decree in favor of the latter Indians awarding to each 160 acres of land, the only question that remains to be considered arises on the appeal of the Wichita and Affiliated Bands — namely whether the court below erred in not decreeing those Indians to be entitled to the proceeds of the sale of such of the lands in question as may be left after making the allotments in severalty required by the act of Congress.

In 1950, in 102 texts there were 750 sentences containing "the United States", and in a random sample of 100, I found 12 subjects, e.g.

340 54: Standard answered that the United States, as insurer of the tanker, would, in view of the nature of the collision, have to reimburse Standard for any loss it sustained in the suit.

In 2000, in 85 texts there were 658 sentences containing "the United States", and in a random sample of 100, I found 19 subjects, e.g.

529  89: The United States did not participate in these cases until appeal, and resolution of the litigation would benefit from the development of a full record by all interested parties.

So the results from this rather sketchy sample are consistent with the hypothesis:

YEAR Rate per 100 1800 1.8 1810 3.5 1850 7 1900 7 1950 12 2000 19

(The "rates" represent the number of instances of "the United States" as the subject of a tensed clause, divided by the number of sentences in which this phrase occurs, all multiplied by 100. In the years 1850 through 2000, I checked a random sample of 100 such sentences — obviously a different random sample would have a different result. This being a Breakfast Experiment™, accuracy took second place to velocity.)

Of course, even if more complete and careful evidence continues to validate the hypothesis, this leaves open many alternative explanations. Perhaps, over time, the federal government has been doing more and more things that would naturally be described by referring to it in subject position. Perhaps the court has gradually shifted from longer and more specific phrases (e.g. "the government of the United States" or "the Solicitor General of the United States") to plain "the United States". Or perhaps, as I suggested in my earlier post, there's been an increasing tendency, even among careful legal thinkers and writers, to exhibit the grammatical consequences of considering "the United States" to be a quasi-animate agent.

My guess is that all of these explanations are likely to be simultaneously true, to some extent. Luckily, it's easy to imagine ways to test them — if you've got access to the full text archive.  And if everyone has access to the same text archive, then others can check, challenge or extend my results.

Women on the Web
The Truth About Marriage, by Carin Rubenstein
Women on the Web
She holds a PhD in social psychology from New York University. That pivotal midlife moment came when my husband and I were visiting our extended family in ...

A common belief says that eating cheese causes vivid dreams or nightmares. However, I couldn't find any support for the idea in the scientific literature except for one bizarre case study.

Although the case report really tells us nothing about the link between cheese and dreaming, it's lovely to read because it's from a bygone day where doctors could write into medical journals with their strange and idiosyncratic observations.

From a 1964 edition of the British Medical Journal:

I have lately seen a patient with moderate essential hypertension who because of various side-effects with other drugs was changed to pargyline, 25 mg every morning; this gave satisfactory control and within a fortnight the patient volunteered that he felt much less depressed, but was having nightmares.

Inquiry produced the fact that he habitually ate one or two ounces (30-60 g) of Cheddar cheese with his supper every evening. The nightmares were of a horrifying nature, and curiously they were concerned not with his immediate family or friends but with people such as his workmates, with whom he was not in any particular emotional relationship. He dreamt of one, terribly mutilated, hanging from a meat-hook. Another he dreamt of falling into a bottomless abyss. When cheese was withdrawn from his diet the nightmares ceased.

I am, etc. J. CHARLES SHEE, Bulawayo, S. Rhodesia.

The mentioned drug, pargyline, as well as being used for hypertension is in the same class of drugs more commonly used as antidepressants.

These are monoamine oxidase B inhibitors (MAOIs) which prevent the breakdown of the monoamine neurotransmitters serotonin, epinephrine and norepinephrine. However, they also prevent the breakdown of the chemical tyramine which occurs naturally in some foods, such as cheese, some soy bean products, processed meats and some fruit and nuts.

A build up of tyramine can cause an increase in blood pressure which can cause headaches, heart problems and increases the chance of stroke (blood vessel blockage or bleeds in the brain). Hence, people taking MAOI antidepressants have to avoid foods high in tyramine to prevent these potentially lethal side-effects.

Interestingly, the fact that the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was apparently avoiding similar foods led to internet rumours that he was on these antidepressants, which caused a media flap when the BBC questioned him about his mental health and use of "pills" to "get through".

Link to PubMed entry for case study with full text option.

USA Today
In a switch, police invite scrutiny of racial profiling
USA Today
It is overseen by an unusual partnership between a prominent academic, Phillip Goff — a social psychology professor at the University of California-Los ...

and more »

BBC News has a fascinating short video report of a robotic hand that is connected to the nerve fibres of an amputated arm and which allows the patient to actually feel touches with the robot fingers.

Although it doesn't mention it in the report, the technology is from the SmartHand research group who are attempting to use knowledge about the cognitive neuroscience of action and body sensation to make fully integrated naturally controlled prosthetics.

There's an interesting part of the video where the patient says "When I grab something tightly I can feel it in the finger tips, which is strange because I don't have them anymore".

In other words, despite the fact that the robot hand feeds touch information into the nerve fibres into the arm stump, the patient feels the sensations 'in' the robot fingers.

This is essentially the 'rubber hand illusion' and the same research group demonstrated exactly this in a recent experiment where they induced touch sensations in a robot hand by stroking it and the stump simultaneously.

This is interesting because a recent study found that sensations in people with intact arms only transferred to a realistic looking rubber hand and not a wooden one, whereas this research team uses a obviously false robot limb.

The fact that touches transfer to an obviously false hand for someone with an amputation but not for people with intact limbs is interesting, because it suggests that brain's remaining body-image 'maps' for the amputated hand may be being recruited to enhance the illusion.

Link to BBC News video report "New robotic hand 'can feel'".
Link to SmartHand project.

The heart is not a lonely hunter, MIT Sloan professor finds
Reuters
In an article this month in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Ackerman and Douglas T. Kenrick of Arizona State University describe the results of ...

While people are discussing the label polymath in another thread (which reports that the polymathic Noam Chomsky has been cited as, in descending order, a philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, and author, but not as a linguist), a letter to the New York Times Magazine (October 18, p. 12, from Andrew Charig of Middlefield, Mass.) laments the death of William Safire, "who most likely was the foremost expert on the American language". Expert?

Ben Zimmer made note, in his "On Language" piece on Safire (on October 11), of Safire's "acute awareness of the limits of his own expertise". Bill never called himself an expert, or a linguist for that matter, and rightly so. He was a journalist who wrote enthusiastically about the English language (getting his information from references, his mail, and the work of his assistants) and expressed opinions about English usage, but he was no kind of scholar and didn't pretend to be one.

(A side point: "the foremost expert on the American language" is unanchored in time. I assume that Charig meant merely that at the time of his death, Safire was the foremost expert on the American language, but he could be construed as saying that Safire was the foremost expert of the late 20th century, or of the whole 20th century, or of all time.)

Now, a question for the readers: who would you nominate as the foremost expert on the American language (in one or another of these time periods)? An obvious candidate is H. L. Mencken, author of The American Language (originally published in 1919, with revisions and weighty supplements over the following decades).

Mencken is an interesting case. Like Safire, he was (proudly) self-taught and strongly opinionated, and journalism was the center of his working life. Mencken, however, developed his enthusiasm for American English beyond the writing of columns, to a systematic survey of the language, thus making himself into a kind of expert, though without an academic association.

Moving to more recent times, we'd want someone who was an expert in all aspects of American English: lexicon, pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), morphosyntax, sociolinguistics, and dialectology, and the historical developments in all of these areas. There are first-class experts in each of these areas, sometimes covering two or three, but covering them all is a hard row to hoe; there is just so much known now in each of them. Bill Labov is probably as close as it gets.

But I'm happy to hear other nominations.

Sensory deprivation lasting only 15 minutes is enough to trigger hallucinations in healthy members of the public, according to a new study published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

The researchers were interested in resurrecting the somewhat uncontrolled research done in the 50s and 60s where participants were dunked into dark, silent, body temperature float tanks where they subsequently reported various unusual perceptions.

In this study the researchers screening a large number of healthy participants using a questionnaire that asks about hallucinatory experiences in everyday life. On the basis of this, they recruited two groups: one of 'high' hallucinators and another of 'low' hallucinators.

They then put the participants, one by one, in a dark anechoic chamber which shields all incoming sounds and deadens any noise made by the participant. The room had a 'panic button' to stop the experiment but apparently no-one needed to use it.

They asked participants to sit in the chamber for 15 minutes and then, immediately after, used a standard assessment to see whether they'd had an unusual experiences.

After a twenty minute break, they were asked again about perceptual distortions to see if there were any difference when normal sensation was restored.

Hallucinations, paranoid thoughts and low mood were reported more often after sensory deprivation for both groups but, interestingly, people already who had a tendency to have hallucinations in everyday life had a much greater level of perceptual distortion after leaving the chamber than the others.

This study complements research published in 2004 that found that visual hallucinations could be induced in healthy participants just by getting them to wear a blindfold for 96 hours.

However, my attention was grabbed by the researchers use of a 'panic button'. The effect of having a panic button in sensory deprivation experiments was specifically studied in 1964 by psychologists Martin Orne and Karl Scheibe. They also asked about hallucinations and compared two groups of people.

One group was met by researchers in white coats, given a medical examination and told to press a 'panic button' if they wanted out. The other was met by researchers in causal clothes, weren't given medical checks, and told to knock on the window if they wanted the experiment to stop.

The actual sensory deprivation part was the same, but the group with the panic button reported many more hallucinations, likely owing to 'demand characteristics', or, in other words, their expectations of what might happen.

We also know that an increase in anxiety also increases the likelihood of hallucinations, and having a 'panic button' during an experiment, I suspect, is likely put most people a little more on edge.

So we can't be sure that the effect was purely due to sensory deprivation, but it does chime with various other studies showing that when we reduce our normal sensations, the brain has a tendency to 'fill in' with hallucinations.

Link to PubMed entry for sensory deprivation study.

Paul Krugman, "The Banks Are Not Alright", NYT, 10/18/2009:

Mr. Summers still insists that the administration did the right thing: more government provision of capital, he says, would not “have been an availing strategy for solving problems.”

Use of "availing" in this way struck me as a new linguistic strategy.  But the OED gives availing as a participial adjective meaning "Advantageous, profitable; of beneficial efficiency", with glosses back to the 15th century:

c1420 Pallad. on Husb. I. 562 To faat hem is avayling and plesaunte. 1850 MRS. BROWNING Substitution Poems I. 327 Speak Thou, availing Christ! 1862 RUSKIN Unto this Last 118 A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength.

And availingly is glossed as "In an availing manner; so as to avail or profit", with citations back to 1853:

1853 FABER Ess. Lives of Saints 116 Its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters.

A check at Literature Onine reveals that availing-the-adjective was a favorite of the Methodist leader Charles Wesley, whose hymns included phrases like "the much-availing prayer", "his all-availing prayer", "his blood's availing plea", "my faith's availing cry", and so on.

However, the string "an availing" is not otherwise found in the NYT's index since 1981; nor is "availing strategy". Nor is it found in the current Google News index, other than in Krugman's column and in Ronald Orol, "Summers: 'Time has come' for deep change for banks", MarketWatch, which quotes Summers at greater length:

Responding to a question about whether more capital should have been injected into banks during the height of the crisis, Summers said there is no evidence now that the U.S. should have poured larger amounts of capital into banks. He argued that the government's massive capital injection into American International Group Inc., a $190 billion injection in exchange for an 80% government stake, was not a model for troubled banks.

"Whatever you thought about actions of last spring, now you have to be more comfortable that the right thing was done," Summers said. "I am not struck by anything we have observed [since the Spring] that a systematic government effort to do for more financial institutions like what was done for AIG - and to do that as a matter of choice rather than as a matter of necessity - would have been an availing strategy for solving problems."

Nor is "an|the availing" found in the 100-million-word BNC corpus, nor in the 400-million-word COCA corpus.  However, I did find an example of "an availing" in a 1922 letter to the editor of the NYT about faith healing:

This work is not at all in conflict with that done by physicians. Not until every living soul has an availing faith can doctors be safely done away with.

So where has availing-the-adjective been keeping itself for the past 80-odd years? And how did it make the transition from faith to finance? Has Larry Summers been reading himself to sleep with the Lives of the Saints? Or is "an availing strategy" an availing collocation in the upper reaches of finance, education, or government, at levels so rarefied that mere journalists have missed it until now?