Being Human

It's an age old story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. The trauma of the breakup affects his mind so badly he starts to believe he's in a boy band. The whole band get admitted to an asylum and start hallucinating a long list of cheap clichés about mental illness. Yes, it's the video for 'N Sync's 1999 track "I Drive Myself Crazy" which is wrong in just so many ways.

If I was their consulting psychologist, my first thought on observing their behaviour and mental state would be - what the feck happened to your hair?

Is this some sort of bizarre form of public self-harm? Or the result of an unknown type of psychosis?

Call the DSM-V committee.

This is an emergency.

Link to N Sync video 'I Drive Myself Crazy'.

The New York Times covers the recent flap over the internet publication of the ink blots used in the Rorschach test. While the images are out of copyright and can be legally uploaded, some American psychologists are furious that the validity of the test may be compromised.

The test has been controversial since it was created and partly because of what it symbolises. It is one of the few remaining tests that are drawn from the psychoanalytic tradition and so battles over the Rorschach are always partly battles over the validity of Freudian-ideas.

You can see the influence of these ideas in how it is used. It is a type of 'projective' test, where participants are shown the images and then asked to give their impressions. The psychologist writes down what they make of each image and then interprets what they say and do.

These interpretations supposedly give an insight into the person's personality, loosely framed in Freudian concepts.

The original version of the Rorschach was quite clearly hokum, but over the years the 'comprehensive system' was developed by psychologist John Exner which allowed independent clinicians to come to similar conclusions when assessing the same responses.

Not everyone agrees on this and, on the basis of evidence reviews, some argue that the test's reliability has been exaggerated. But the trouble is, even if it is reliable, it's still a bit rubbish. It doesn't seem to correlate well with other mental health measures and has a particular tendency to 'diagnose' schizophrenic tendencies in perfectly healthy people.

While the release of the ink blots onto the internet seems to have caused controversy among US psychologists, most European psychologists are likely to be rolling their eyes, as the test never caught on and is largely extinct.

However, the wider issue of test material being released online is of significant concern.

Almost every psychological test relies on the fact that the person being assessed has no foreknowledge of the material. In technology terms, they rely on security through obscurity for their validity.

Currently, this is enforced by the test companies only supplying tests to qualified professionals, charging excessively high prices for each one and enforcing copyright. This is backed up by professional organisations who come down like a ton of bricks on anyone seen to be promoting wider availability.

As anyone involved in security will tell you, this model is doomed to failure in the age of the internet as it only takes one significant breach for the test to be publicly available.

Psychologists need to start designing tests where knowledge of the test material does not have such a profound influence on performance, but unfortunately, this requires a significant shift in current thinking and a huge research effort to validate the tests. Hence inertia weds us to our current doomed methods.

Link to NYT 'A Rorschach Cheat Sheet on Wikipedia?'

Sometimes, it's just harder to do it without the innuendo. HelmetsRUs have a multi-sport helmet that has a brain painted on the outside.

While we usually tell people to wear helmets to keep the rocks out of their brain, this is the first time you might have to avoid keeping your brain out of the rocks.

I have to say, it's a bit of a weird product if you think about it. I mean, would you buy a jock strap with your balls painted on the outside?

Obviously, that was intended to be a rhetorical question, but I've come to realise that the internet has killed rhetorical questions because you can always find someone who has lived your figure of speech, no matter how bizarre you make it.

Really? You own several you say? Could I interest you in a brain helmet...

Link to brain helmet.

ABC Radio National's Night Air has a wonderfully atmospheric programme on hallucinations, or maybe visual art, or the sensitivity of blindness, or maybe about how the mind constructs reality.

It's deliciously unfocussed and the programme glides hazily between neuroscience, art, poetry and visual consciousness.

There's the occasional moment where the vibe slips off its axis, but otherwise it's just a shear delight to listen to as it mixes artistic and scientific views on the visual.

Link to Night Air programme 'Visual'

I've just found an intriguing article on how LSD was used as an experimental treatment for children with autism during the 1960s. When I first heard about these studies I did a double take, but there were a surprising number conducted at the time.

Flashback to the 1960s: LSD in the treatment of autism.

Dev Neurorehabil. 2007 Jan-Mar;10(1):75-81.

Between 1959 and 1974, several groups of researchers issued reports on the use of d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) in the treatment of children with autism. This paper reviews that literature to consider how the authors justified these studies, as well as their methods, results, and conclusions. The justification for using LSD was often based on the default logic that other treatment efforts had failed. Several positive outcomes were reported with the use of LSD, but most of these studies lacked proper experimental controls and presented largely narrative/descriptive data. Today there is renewed interest in the use of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes. While this resurgence of research has not yet included children with autism, this review of the LSD studies from the 1960s and 1970s offers important lessons for future efforts to evaluate new or controversial treatments for children with autism.

Sadly I don't have access to the full text of the paper, but I've discovered that the Neurodiversity website has created a list of many of the original studies and has archived the full text of most of them online.

The studies are a morbidly fascinating read and it's interesting how some studies seem to exclusively report beneficial effects with remarkably flowery language ("They seek positive contacts with adults, approaching them with face uplifted and bright eyes...") while others report mixed or quite unpleasant reactions ("mood swings which were sharp and rapid from extreme elation to extreme depression or anxiety").

Link to PubMed abstract of LSD and autism paper.
Link to Neurodiversity paper archive.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the role of 'hunches' in how soldiers detect roadside bombs.

The article is a little bit cobbled together, alternating anecdote with some indirectly related studies that seem to be included on the basis of speculation, but it does mention one 'in progress' study which seems particularly interesting.

In the past two years, an Army researcher, Steven Burnett, has overseen a study into human perception and bomb detection involving about 800 military men and women. Researchers have conducted exhaustive interviews with experienced fighters. They have administered personality tests and measured depth perception, vigilance and related abilities. The troops have competed to find bombs in photographs, videos, virtual reality simulations and on the ground in mock exercises...

The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.

If you want more details about the study there are good descriptions here and here seemingly taken from military news coverage of the research.

Link to NYT piece on bombs and hunches.

A new series of the excellent BBC Radio 4 Mind Changers series has just started with a fantastic edition on the Rosenhan experiment - a study that sent seismic waves of controversy through 1970s psychiatry.

Titled 'On being sane in insane places' when published in a 1972 edition of Science, the experiment reported on how Rosenhan and his associates had presented to psychiatric hospitals faking a single psychiatric symptom - a hallucinated voice.

All of the pseudopatients were admitted to hospital and diagnosed with mental illness. They then stopped faking only to find that their normal behaviour was pathologised as a sign of a disturbed mind.

Later, when word got out and the hospitals were accused of being 'bad apples', Rosenhan promised to send more fake patients but, in reality sent none. The hospitals subsequently branded 41 real patients as fakes.

The Mind Changers programme throws much fresh light on this study by examining never-before-seen documents from Rosenhan's own archive.

While the study has often been framed as an attack on psychiatric diagnosis, according to Rosenhan, it was never intended to be. He started out wanting to conduct an anthropological of psychiatric wards.

There's an interesting bit where the hospital admission notes are read out concerning Rosenhan's admission to hospital under a fake name:

Admission note 6th February 1969

The patient, David Lurie, is a 39 year-old married father of two... Three to four months ago he started hearing noises, then voices, recently he has been able to discern that the voices say "It's empty, nothing inside, it's hollow, it makes an empty noise."

Compare this with the description from the original text of the study:

After calling the hospital for an appointment, the pseudopatient arrived at the admissions office complaining that he had been hearing voices. Asked what the voices said, he replied that they were often unclear, but as far as he could tell they said “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.”...

The choice of these symptoms was occasioned by their apparent similarity to existential symptoms. Such symptoms are alleged to arise from painful concerns about the perceived meaninglessness of one’s life. It is as if the hallucinating person were saying, “My life is empty and hollow.”

I'm intrigued that while the paper suggests that the pseudopatients were told to report single word hallucinations, the medical records suggest whole sentences were heard.

I wonder whether the pseudopatients were tempted to embellish their single words or whether the psychiatrists genuinely did weave narratives around the sparse information presented to them.

Either way, as many people have countered, the study is not in itself a very good critique of psychiatric diagnosis. If I go to my doctor and say I'm distressed by hallucinated voices, this is a legitimate symptom of mental illness as far as the doctor is concerned.

However, as psychologist Richard Bentall notes in the programme, much more damning is the fact that once seen as patients, almost everything the fakers did was interpreted as abnormal or pathological in some way.

The fact that diagnosis or clinical opinion is swayed by personal, cultural or professional beliefs is now a well established research finding and this part of Rosenhan's study remains as relevant today as it was in the 1970s.

Link to crap BBC Radio 4 page with audio archive (via @researchdigest)
Link to full text of Rosenhan's study.

The New Atlantis magazine has a fantastic article on the increasing use of robots and artificial intelligence systems in warfare and how they bring the fog of war to the murky area of military ethics and international law.

This comes as the The New York Times has just run a report on a recent closed meeting where some of the world's top artificial intelligence researchers gathered to discuss what limits should be placed on the development of autonomous AI systems.

The NYT article frames the issue as a worry over whether machines will 'outsmart' humans, but the issue is really whether machines will outdumb us, as it is a combination of the responsibilities assigned to them and their limitations which pose the greatest threat.

One particularly difficulty is the unpredictability of AI systems. For example, you may be interested to know that while we can define the mathematical algorithms for simple artificial neural networks, exactly how the network is representing the knowledge it has learnt through training can be a mystery.

If you examine the 'weights' of connections across different instances of the same network after being trained, you can find differences in how they're distributed even though they seem to be completing the task in the same way.

In other words, simply because we have built and trained something, it does not follow that we can fully control its actions or understand its responses in all situations.

In light of this, it is now worryingly common for militaries to publicly deploy or request armed autonomous weapons systems based, at least partly, on similar technologies.

Only recently this has included Israel, South Korea, the US, Australia and South Africa - the latter of which suffered the deaths of nine soldiers when a robot cannon was affected by a software error.

Of course, the use of technology of assist medical decision-making and safety control is also a key issue, but it is the military use of robots which is currently causing the most concern.

And it is exactly this topic that military researcher Peter W. Singer tackles in his engaging article for The New Atlantis magazine.

He traces the history of robot weapons systems, including the little known deployment of unmanned weapons systems in World War Two and Vietnam, and gives some excellent coverage of the latest in war zone robots and how they are being deployed in current conflicts.

Interestingly, the article claims that remotely-controlled drone missions now outnumber manned aircraft missions in the US military, with battles increasingly being fought through pixelated screens and image processing algorithms.

Singer makes the point that the rules of war become murky when the fighting is carried out by software. Copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig has highlighted how social and legal rules are becoming effectively implemented as software ('Code is Law') but the same point can be extended to armed conflict if the Geneva convention is being entrusted to algorithms.

The New Atlantis article is taken from a new book by Singer called Wired for War and if you'd like more on the ethics of AI systems the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has a fantastic and very complete reading list covering all the major issues.

Correction: I originally thought the author was the philosopher Peter Singer and linked to his Wikipedia entry. It turns out it is Peter W. Singer the defence and foreign policy expert. The link has now been fixed!

Link to excellent Peter Singer article in The New Atlantis.
Link to NYT piece on AI limits conference.
Link to AAAI reading list on ethics and AI.

Australian comedy show The Chasers War on Everything has a fantastic sketch about a Jerry Springer-style philosophical talk show hosted by Noam Chomsky.

The script is entirely new but the ideas seems to have been taken from a funny text that has been making the rounds for some years on the net, based on the same premise.

Chomsky was genuinely in a comedy show once, albeit unwittingly, when he was interviewed by Ali G. If you've not seen it, it's also very funny.

Link to The Chomsky Show sketch (via @anibalmastobiza).

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

Neurological injuries from the accident-waiting-to-happen activity 'car surfing' are covered by The Neurocritic.

Technology Review discusses an innovative new neurosurgery technique using ultrasound from outside the skull.

The University of Western Ontario has a list of 'Top Ten Things Sex and Neuroimaging Have in Common'. I would also refer to Lord Chesterfield's multi-purpose quote: "the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable".

PsyBlog lists Mind Hacks as one of '40 Superb Psychology Blogs'. Still no contact from Shakira, clearly shy.

The UK Government's Cabinet Office release a remarkably good report on the psychology of crowd behaviour.

Psychiatric Times has an interesting debate on the validity of PTSD. For and against and still lots of political arguments.

There's an excellent piece on madness and creativity on the Nou Stuff blog.

SciAm's Mind Matters blog has more on creativity and the benefits of psychological distance.

There's an interesting interview with Mind Wars author Jonathan Moreno over at the consistently excellent Developing Intelligence.

The New York Times has an obituary for influential child psychologist Sidney Bijou.

Speaking without Broca's area was one of many excellent pieces on this week's BPS Research Digest.

Health Report from ABC Radio National had a special on Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

Are British men useless at romance? asks Dr Petra as she covers a recent media friendly vapourware study.

New Scientist covers the case of a girl with half a brain who retains full vision. A visual cortex serving both sides of space has developed on one hemisphere only.

A new study potentially solves the mystery of why the problematic protein in Huntingdon's disease is affected in only certain brain cells when it's present throughout the body. Excellent coverage from The Neuroskeptic.

Psychology Today has a feature article by Jonah Lehrer on neuroaesthetics and the brain science of art.

The public place of anthropology and the problems with the meme theory are discussed over at Neuroanthropology. Also see their earlier critique of memes, probably one of the best ripostes to the idea on the net.

Ockham's Razor from ABC Radio National has an interesting opinion piece on why medical diagnoses don't always cut the mustard in people with complex health and psychological problems.

To the bunkers! Press release from robot company: "We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population..."

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers research on the neuroscience of escaping predators. Like corpse feeding futurist robots perhaps?

Exposure to traffic pollution linked to reduce IQ in children, according to a study reported by Science News.

Neuro Times has a brilliant post on Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist Charles Sherrington's classic The Integrative Action of the Nervous System'

The psychology of happiness or the psychology of saying you're more happy? The Splintered Mind looks at the problem of self-reporting mental states in happiness studies.

American Scientist has an excellent review of two new books on embodied cognition and how our minds might extend to our environments.

"...staying in the parental home is a stronger risk factor for young men’s violence than any other single factor". Conclusions from an interesting study covered by Neuronarrative.

Science News has a piece on how a spinal fluid test may help predict who will develop Alzheimer's disease.

Music video director duo Terri Timely have created a beautifully shot and kaleidoscopic short film about synaesthesia.

It's a visually striking piece that attempts to represent the effect of crossed senses conceptually, rather the the common approach of interpreting sounds as abstract visual impressions (probably best done in the video for Coldcut's Music 4 No Musicians).

I also just like the idea. Music video directors are professional synaesthetes in many ways, so it's interesting getting their take on the experience.

To see it in its full glory, I recommend the hi-definition QuickTime version.

Link to embedded YouTube version (via @willyumlu)
Link to hi-def QuickTime version.

New Scientist has an excellent piece on how new research on the psychology of crowds is challenging the idea that people become an 'unruly mob' in large numbers. In fact, recent research shows that people tend to cooperate and quickly achieve an altruistic and bonded group identity when in large numbers.

This partly relies on the fact that our group identity is fluid, as demonstrated by an elegant experiment by crowd psychologist Mark Levine that the article touches on:

The fluidity of group psychology was also demonstrated in a 2005 experiment on English soccer fans by Mark Levine at the University of Lancaster, UK. He found that supporters of Manchester United who had been primed to think about how they felt about their team were significantly more likely to help an injured stranger if he was wearing a Manchester United shirt, rather than an unbranded shirt or one of rival team Liverpool.

However, fans who were primed to think about their experience of being a football fan in general were equally likely to help strangers in Liverpool shirts and Manchester United shirts, but far less likely to help someone wearing an unbranded one (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 31, p 443). This shows the potency of group membership, and also how fluid the boundaries can be.

The article mentions several studies of dangerous crowd situations where there seems to have been large scale spontaneous co-operation that seemed to have averted more serious problems.

We recently covered research that found that the more people present at a confrontation, the less likely there is to be a violence outcome, although there were specific turning points where violence could go either way.

As the piece mentions, this is particularly interesting in light of a tactic called 'kettling' commonly employed by UK police to control large crowds. It involves surrounding the crowd and letting individuals leave but not letting anyone back in.

The psychology of this tactic was discussed by Bob Hughes, the head of training at the Metropolitan Police's Public Order Unit, on a 2004 edition of BBC All in the Mind.

Interestingly, he describes it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where eventually the need to protest will be overtaken by the need to eat, drink, rest and so on, and so people will slowly disperse.

This is a distinctly individualistic approach to crowd psychology. It assumes that the crowd will be violent and so needs to be contained but that it can be broken down on an individual basis.

One implication from this new research on crowd psychology is that the kettling process itself may trigger violence on the first place, because it sets up a confrontational situation and strengthens the crowds' group identity at the same time.

Link to NewSci piece on the 'wisdom of crowds'.

An interesting aside from a 1983 study that describes how some elderly psychiatric patients experienced photos and TV images as real people with whom they could interact:

A new sub-type of perceptual disorder was identified in 7 patients who treated T.V. images and newspaper photographs (e.g. a nude calendar girl) as if they were real and existed in the three-dimensional space. These patients talked to the images, saw them moving freely and on occasions offered them food and drink. This disorder which the authors would like to term the "picture sign" can best be described as a "sensory delusion"; no significant association between this sign and sex, age, underlying pathology, impending death or cognitive score was identified.

I've often heard the cliché that patients with dementia believe that people on television are in the room with them, but this is the nearest I've come to discovering any published research on the topic. If you know of any, do let me know.

However, if you're a Spanish speaker, there was an interesting incident captured on a phone-in TV game show, where an elderly and presumably somewhat confused contestant calls the show, hears her own voice coming from the television and thinks it is someone else joining in the conversation.

Brilliantly, the exasperated game show host sticks with it and everything gets delightfully surreal.

ABC Radio National's Background Briefing has a good programme on the issues and debates about the new version of the DSM that is currently being prepared and causing much flailing of handbags in the process.

The radio show is not particularly focused but touches on some contentious diagnoses and the problems with defining mental illness.

But there is one surprising part where they ask Australian psychiatrist and DSM-V committee member Gavin Andrews to respond to criticisms by ex-committee chief Robert Spitzer over the lack of openness in the process.

His answer, like an earlier response from American Psychiatric Association to their critics, is remarkable for the fact it contains a personal attack:

Well, he was the guy that wrote DSM-III, and we all owe him a considerable debt because someone had to be strong-willed and very strongly opinionated to pull that off. He's saying, something's going on and no-one's telling me everything. Well, there's no need for him to be told everything day by day. I'm sure he probably hasn't read all those books that we've already published, and he certainly hasn't written to me about the research planning conference that I ran. So I presume it's a sense of not being on the centre of the stage, as he once sensibly and gloriously was.

Believe it or not, it actually sounds more patronising when you hear the original audio. Either these ad hominem attacks are a sign of the committee being rattled or they are evidence for exactly what the critics accuse them of, and neither is particular promising.

And if anyone thinks that the squabbling was just a bit of internal politicking, you might be interested to know that it's featured as one of the major news stories in this week's Nature.

However, while the DSM is often described as the psychiatric 'bible', it's probably more accurate to call it the American psychiatrists' 'bible'.

While it's widely used in the US and Latin America, much of the rest of the world uses the slightly less barmy (pun intended) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) from the World Health Organisation.

The danger is not so much that the DSM will become ridiculous, but that it will become irrelevant.

Link to Background Briefing on 'Expanding mental illness'.

There's an intriguing study about to be published in Psychological Science finding that people wearing prism glasses that shift everything to the right overestimate the passage of time, while people wearing left-shift glasses underestimate it.

The researchers, led by psychologist Francesca Frassinetti, asked participants to watch a square appear on-screen for varying time periods, and then reproduce the duration or half the duration with a key press.

Glasses that skewed vision to the left seemed to shrink time, while glasses that skew everything to the right expanded it.

Apart from the interesting perceptual effect, it gives further evidence for the idea that our internals model of space and time are heavily linked, to the point where modifying one has a knock-on effect on the other.

In fact, there is increasing evidence that other abstract concepts are implicitly understood as having a spatial layout. Experiments on the SNARC effect have found that numbers seem to have a 'location', with larger numbers being on the right and smaller numbers on the left.

At least, that seems to be the case for native English-speakers, but for Arabic speakers, where text is written right-to-left, the reverse seems to be true.

It would be interesting to whether Arabic speakers show a reverse time alteration effect of if they wear prism glasses. Whatever the answer, it would raise lots of interesting questions about how much language influences our abstract ideas and whether it only applies to certain concepts.

Prism glasses have long been a tool in psychology and there is a mountain of research on how we adjust to living in the world even when everything is shifted through the lens.

Tom recently found a fantastic (1950s?) archive film called 'Living in a Reversed World: Some Experiments on How We See the Directions of Things' where several volunteers are asked to wear prism glasses for weeks on end.

Hilarity ensues, at least at first, but as co-ordination skills adapt the volunteers can go about their daily tasks, to the point of being able to ride bicycles, even when their vision has been flipped around.

Link to summary of prism and time perception study.
Link to Living in a Reversed World (via @tomstafford)

Psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum has written an excellent short article about a remarkable group of blind mountain bikers who apparently use echolocation to avoid obstacles by making loud click sounds as they ride.

Rosenblum has studied human echolocation in the lab and has shown that we all have some ability to get an idea of the spatial layout of our environment from sound reflection.

But one of the most interesting bits is where he discusses the fact that while echolocation uses sound, we don't always process it as a conscious hearing experience. It can seem to just be a 'sense' of where objects are.

To get a sense of how echolocation works, try this. Hold your hand up about one foot in front of your face with your palm facing your mouth. Put your front teeth together, open your lips, and make a continuous shhhhhh sound. As you make this sound, slowly bring your hand toward your mouth. You will hear the shhhh sound change. What you’re hearing is the sound reflecting from your hand colliding with the sound leaving your mouth. This interference turns out to be one of the most important types of sound dimensions we use to echolocate objects at close distances.

But this demonstration is exaggerated. The interference patterns used for echolocation are usually too subtle to be consciously heard. This highlights one of the most amazing aspects of echolocation: It’s rarely experienced as sound. Try using your shhhh sounds to walk slowly toward a wall with your eyes closed. As you come close to the wall, you’ll experience its presence as more of a feeling than a change in sound. It may feel as if there are air pressure changes on your face, an experience also reported by the blind (echolocation was once called “facial vision”). Echolocation is truly one of your implicit perceptual skills: It allows you to detect aspects of your environment without even knowing which sensory system you’re using.

Link to post of echolocation and blind mountain bikers.
pdf of Rosenblum study on human echolocation.
Link to DOI entry for same.

Good God there's a lot of scientific research on chewing gum. And I mean a lot. Here's just a few of the latest bulletins from the front line of chewing gum cognitive science.

Chewing gum does not induce context-dependent memory when flavor is held constant [link]

Effects of chewing gum on mood, learning, memory and performance of an intelligence test [link]

Effects of caffeine in chewing gum on mood and attention [link]

Chewing gum alleviates negative mood and reduces cortisol during acute laboratory psychological stress [link]

Chewing gum and context-dependent memory: the independent roles of chewing gum and mint flavour [link]

Chewing gum and context-dependent memory effects: a re-examination [link]

Chewing gum and cognitive performance: a case of a functional food with function but no food [link]

Role of glucose in chewing gum-related facilitation of cognitive function [link]

Chewing gum can produce context-dependent effects upon memory [link]

Chewing gum differentially affects aspects of attention in healthy subjects [link]

Chewing gum selectively improves aspects of memory in healthy volunteers [link]

Effects of three principal constituents in chewing gum on electroencephalographic activity [link]

Smell and taste of chewing gum affect frequency domain EEG source localizations [link]

And not one on whether chewing gum loses its flavour on the bedpost overnight.

Actually, those are just a sample of the cognitive science studies on chewing gum, and there are many more. If you count all scientific studies with 'chewing gum' in the title, you get more than 540 to date.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments, a great addition from historian of psychology Chris Green:

There is a long history of "scientific" (read: "industrial") research into the effects of chewing gum. The Beech-Nut company hired Columbia U. psychologist Harry Hollingworth to do a study of the "psychodynamics" of gum-chewing in the mid-1930s. Philip Wrigley also commissioned research and used the "results" (mainly, that gum-chewing reduces tension and improves concentration) to convince to U.S. Army to include (his) gum in the rations of every American soldier who served in WWII. He also tried to convince a variety of businesses to supply gum to their workers, on the strength of the same basic argument.

The 19th century French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette is best known for Tourette's Syndrome, but a fascinating article in European Neurology traces his interest in the criminal uses of hypnosis.

It is full of surprising facts, like that he was shot in the head by a delusional patient who believed that she had been hypnotised against her will, and that he eventually died in a Swiss asylum after developing psychosis caused by syphilis.

We now know that hypnosis cannot be used to make people do things against their will, but at the time it was widely believed that women could be hypnotised to be easy prey to sexual predators, and even that otherwise innocent people could be hypnotised to be killers against their will. Sort of like a 19th century Manchurian Candidate.

The murder of a public notary by Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard in 1889, in which Bompard said she was hypnotised to be a murderer, made headlines around the world (you can still read The New York Times coverage online) and also served as a public battle over whether hypnosis could be used for criminal ends.

France was the centre of hypnosis research at the time and many experiments were carried out where hypnotised people were asked to 'kill' people with prop weapons to test their compliance. Neurologists Gilles de la Tourette and Jean-Martin Charcot were famous for their work on hypnosis and hysteria and weighed into the heated legal debate.

The patient who shot Gilles de la Tourette was not hypnotised, however, although was delusional and believed that she was. Hypnosis is a common theme of psychosis even today and your average inpatient psychiatric ward may well contain a patient or two who believe they are being 'controlled' or 'mesmerised' by hypnosis.

In Gilles de la Tourette's case, the incident is notable not least because he suffered a bullet in the brain, had it yanked out, and was writing to his friend about the experience later in the day.

...he was shot - for real - at his home in Paris by Rose Kamper-Lecoq, a 29-year-old former patient from La Salpêtrière and Sainte-Anne who later claimed that she had been hypnotized from a distance...

Rose asked him for some money, claiming that she was without resources because her hypnotism sessions had altered her will, and shot him when he refused. There were three shots, with only the first one reaching its target. Fortunately for Gilles de la Tourette, it resulted in only a superficial occipital wound, and he was even able to write to Montorgueil about the event the same evening.

The article has a copy of the letter with the description "The writing is uneasy, but Gilles de la Tourette reassures Montorgueil and explains that the bullet has been removed, ending the letter with the comment 'What a strange story' ('Quelle drôle d'histoire')".

Anyway, a fascinating article, freely available, and full of fantastic images and illustrations from newspapers of the time.

Link to full-text of article (scroll down).
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Poker is considered one of the most skillful of betting games, but a new study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies reports on an artificial neural network that predicts gambler's bets to three decimals places.

The system was built by researcher Victor Chan who created a relatively simply backpropogation neural network to predict future plays.

Backprop networks take a bunch of inputs, feed them through layers of loose mathematical simulations of neurons which then make a guess at an output.

Crucially, the network is initially given a set of training data on which it can modify its 'guesses' based on how wrong its initial estimation was. The amount of error is fed back through the network and each 'neuron' adjusts the strengths of its connections to other neurons to minimise the error next time round.

Chan used the playing patterns of six online Texas Hold 'em players each of whom played more than 100 games each. He entered just an initial series of games for each player to train the network and then asked it to predict how the following plays would go.

...it was to the author’s surprise that the neural network for M1 upon training turned out to be able to predict a gambler’s bet amounts in successive games accurately to more than three decimal places of the dollar on average for each of the six gamblers in our data sample across the board.

More importantly, the neural network for M2 upon training was also able to track the temporal trajectory of a gambler’s cumulative winnings/losses, i.e., successively predict the gambler’s cumulative winnings/losses, with a similar accuracy again for each of the six gamblers in our data sample across the board.

...the influence of a gambler’s skills, strategies, and personality on his/her cumulative winnings/losses is almost totally reflected by the pattern(s) of his/her cumulative winnings/losses in the several immediately preceding games.

In other words, from a sample of initial plays, each gambler's behaviour was almost completely mathematically predictable in the same way across all six people.

Now, if they could only get a neural network to predict plays in strip poker, I think they'd be onto something.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

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

NPR has a good piece on the vagaries of analysing functional brain scans.

Philosopher Pete Mandik features Mind Hacks as a 'Top 10 mind and brain blog' for blogs.com. Shakira yet to call.

The Independent covers the debate on clozapine - the best antipsychotic available that treats mortality-reducing schizophrenia but which causes potentially fatal white blood cell collapse in 10% 1-2% of patients. Choose your poison. Discuss.

Psychiatric-service dogs, especially trained to assist patients with mental illness, are discussed by the Wall Street Journal.

BBC News has an opinion piece by always thought provoking against-the-grain psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff on why psychotropic medication should be considered separately from mental illnesses. Frontier Psychiatrist has a thoughtful response to the debate.

The side-effects from sugar pills nocebo effect is covered by Brain Blogger

Neuroskeptic has a good complimentary piece on the placebo effect in prescribed medication.

There's a good piece on 'How chaos drives the brain' on New Scientist. I always assume chaos is just a sign of caffeine deficiency.

Neurotopia covers a brain imaging study on a 'super memoriser'.

The kazillion dollar war on some drugs is featured in a special issue of Mother Jones magazine.

Schizophrenia Forum has a fantastic discussion from some of the world's leading schizophrenia researchers on the significance of the recent high profile whole genome studies.

Anthropology, teaching and the great student swindle is discussed in an insightful article on Neuroanthropology.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the Blue Brain project. Neglects to mention that it becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.

Crypto ninja Bruce Schneier discusses the interesting concept of privacy salience and the psychology of online service design.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece on how autism and academia can go hand in hand, while BBC News covers a software company that specifically looks for employees on the autism spectrum.

A cute but gimmicky sleep monitor is covered by The New York Times. It describes it as recording 'brain waves' but it looks like it uses near infrared spectroscopy to measure blood flow. See what you're missing ladies.

Nassir Ghaemi is a well known research psychiatrist who writes an increasingly excellent blog called Mood Swings

New Scientist covers the "first-ever neurobiological study of honesty and cheating", apparently by a journalist with amnesia for all the other studies.

Ding ding. Round 3. More DSM-V bun fighting on Psychiatric News: "I wish to call attention to the imperiousness, arrogance, and secrecy..."

Neurophilosophy covers researching finding that swearing increases pain tolerance.

Jonah Lehrer reviews 'You Are Here', a new book on spatial perception and intelligence for The New York Times.

The excellent Situationist blog has a fantastic article on the legal implications of implicit biases.

Dr Shock discusses a recent thought-provoking article on neuroscience and architecture.