Being Human

The latest edition of the journal Emotion has a fascinating study comparing common concepts of happiness and unhappiness between Americans and Japanese people. While we tend to think that 'happiness' is a universal concept, it turns out that we think of it in quite culturally specific ways.

Happiness and unhappiness in east and west: Themes and variations.

Emotion. 2009 Aug;9(4):441-56.

Uchida Y, Kitayama S.

Cultural folk models of happiness and unhappiness are likely to have important bearings on social cognition and social behavior. At present, however, little is known about the nature of these models. Here, the authors systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants' spontaneously produced descriptions of the two emotions and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans associated positive hedonic experience of happiness with personal achievement, Japanese associated it with social harmony.

Furthermore, Japanese were more likely than Americans to mention both social disruption and transcendental reappraisal as features of happiness. As also predicted, unlike happiness, descriptions of unhappiness included various culture-specific coping actions: Whereas Americans focused on externalizing behavior (e.g., anger and aggression), Japanese highlighted transcendental reappraisal and self-improvement. Implications for research on culture and emotion are discussed.

Link to PubMed entry for the study.

The New York Times Well blog covers the growing amount of research on how the same genes that give rise to red hair also make red heads more sensitive to pain.

This has knock-on effects for doctors and dentists in that greater levels of pain killers are needed for red haired patients:

Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.

The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body’s sensitivity to pain. A 2004 study showed that redheads require, on average, about 20 percent more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blond coloring. And in 2005, researchers found that redheads are more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia, such as the numbing drugs used by dentists.

Link to NYT Well Blog on 'The Pain of Being a Redhead'.

There are two intriguing cases studies in the latest edition of the journal Sleep and Breathing of people with persistent yawning.

Normally, recurrent yawning might be put down to tiredness, but in these cases, both women slept well. They could, however, reduce their yawning by cooling themselves - suggesting that yawning and heat regulation may be linked.

Both of their symptoms are very similar. Each complains of unpredictable and uncontrolled yawning attacks lasting from 5 to 45 min. During these excessive yawning episodes, they experience deep, recurrent, overwhelming yawns that cause their eyes to water and nose to run. Occurring one to 15 times a day, these attacks are very aversive and debilitating, and both patients report feeling ill and exhausted following an attack. The most common diagnosis is a sleep disorder, although neither patient reports sleep problems.

These cases include features consistent with a diagnosis of thermoregulatory dysfunction. Both patients report that nasal breathing and/or applying cool cloths to the forehead can provide temporary relief and/or postpone the onset of an attack...

Taking a cold shower or swimming in cold water after the onset of an attack produces complete remission of symptoms for the South African woman. Both patients report feeling cold during or after an attack and experience goose bumps and shivering which may be a consequence of overcompensation by cooling mechanisms activated during thermoregulatory dysfunction.

Although it is still not well understood why we yawn, this gels with some growing evidence that heat regulation may be at least part of the story.

In one intriguing study [pdf], nasal breathing and forehead cooling reduced 'contagious yawning' where yawns are more likely to be triggered when we see other people doing the same.

Link to PubMed entry for yawning case studies.

The Hawthorne Effect is famous for showing that people will change their behaviour when observed, or that any change increases productivity, or perhaps that experimenters always influence their participants. It has become one of those legends of psychology that turns out to be not quite what we believe.

It's the subject of the second edition of BBC Radio 4's excellent Mind Changers series which discovers that the original studies, their interpretations and the effect itself have become somewhat mythical.

The studies were conducted on employees of the Hawthorne works in Chicago, a factory that built relays switches for the telephone industry.

The research, conducted between the 1920s and 30s, was not always as systematic as it could have been and was mostly close observations of five women, giving rise to fascinating experimenters' reports, some of which are read out on the programme.

Unlike studies today, the researchers carefully noted their opinion of the personality of the workers, their conversations, what was happening in their lives and how this affected their productivity.

The actual findings that give rise to the 'Hawthorne effect' are in doubt and are still debated (there was some fascinating news on the Advances in the History of Psychology blog about this just recently) but the study was hugely influential in that it was the first to connect the personal to the commercial.

Workers were no longer just cogs in the industrial machine who were lost from sight as soon as they left the factory, but people whose work was intimately connected to their home and social lives.

This is now the basis of modern management techniques and the Hawthorne studies, regardless of the debates over the evidence, were the inspiration.

Anyway, another brilliant documentary from the Mind Changers series put together by the ever-excellent Claudia Hammond.

Link to Mind Changers on the Hawthorne Effect.

Last night, I walked past a bus stop adorned with a poster advertising the new BBC science programme Bang Goes the Theory asking "Is it possible to tickle yourself?" and giving a number to text for an explanation.

Fantastic, I thought. Neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's work on the role of action prediction in the sensory attenuation of self-produced actions summarised in 160 characters.

But here's the response I got sent to my phone:

Your brain tells your body not to react when you tickle yourself hard, but skin with no hair is sensitive to a light touch. More at http://bbc.co.uk/bang

Admittedly, I was a little worse for wear last night, but even in the cold hard light of day, this doesn't make a lot of sense.

The second bit ("skin with no hair is sensitive to a light touch") just seems irrelevant to the question, the webpage has nothing more and the actual explanation is kinda screwy.

Your brain is not telling your body not to react because, except for reflex actions (which are handled by reflex arcs and can be managed entirely by the spinal cord), sensory reactions are handled by the brain.

So if you're taking this line, a more accurate description is that your brain is telling your brain not to react but this still explains virtually nothing about why you can't tickle yourself.

However, a scientific paper [pdf] entitled 'Why can't you tickle yourself?' addresses exactly this question.

The science of this is quite well known (in fact, it was featured in the original Mind Hacks book as Hack #65) but in summary it seems that the brain simulates of the outcomes of actions based on your intentions to move because the actual sensory information from the body takes so long to arrive that we'd be dangerously slow if we relied only on this.

This slower information is used for periodic updates to keep everything grounded in reality, but it looks like most of our action is run off the simulation.

We can also use the simulation to distinguish between movements we cause ourselves and movements caused by other things, on the basis that if we are causing the movement, the prediction is going to be much more accurate.

If the prediction is accurate, the brain reduces the intensity of the sensations arising from the movement - for good safety reasons, perhaps - we want to be more aware of contact from other things than touches from ourselves.

So Aunty BBC, here's one you can use for free:

Your brain predicts the effects of movement and reduces sensations if it guesses right. We guess our own actions better, so it tickles less. http://is.gd/2978A

The next one will cost you the 10p I spent texting Bang Goes the Theory for an inaccurate explanation.

pdf of scientific paper 'Why can't you tickle yourself?'
Link to Hack #65 in Mind Hacks.

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

I've just discovered the wonders of the Mental Nurse blog, which has a fantastically insightful piece on the dark cultural effects of nurse training.

Harpers Magazine has six questions for Oliver Sacks on music and the brain.

There's a simple but genius demonstration of the innate structure of music by Bobby McFerrin at the World Science Festival.

Dr Petra examines media pressures and the celebrity psychologist in 'A tale of two psychologists'.

The risk of dementia is vastly increased in middle aged people who who smoke, have high blood pressure or diabetes, according to research reported by BBC News.

Neuron Culture investigates suicides in US army veterans and why veteran's mental health care falls short.

New Scientist has an article on 'ten mysteries of you' of which several are mind and brain mysteries.

Can we emulate the architecture of the brain on a microchip? asks H+ Magazine in a roundup of 'silicon intelligence' projects.

The Telegraph reports comments by the lost-the-plot head of the UK's Catholic Church who says that Facebook leads young people to commit suicide. Actually, I didn't think there was an app for that yet.

Kids with imaginary friends have superior narrative skills, according to research expertly covered by the BPS Research Digest.

New Scientist reports on research finding that while watching a film, we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don't miss anything important.

There's an excellent analysis of a recent media flap over 'bug spray damages nerves' headlines over at Neuroskeptic.

The Economist has an article on the USA's sometimes bizarre sex offender laws and their ineffectiveness at tackling sex offences.

Public opinion about psychiatric medications have been improving since the 1990s even in 'situations where there might not be a proven benefits', according to a study covered by Somatosphere.

BBC News reports on research finding that we tend to get happier was we live into old age.

A evidence-based approach to teaching psychotherapy styles in covered in an excellent piece by Dr Shock.

The Science Show from ABC Radio National had a segment on 'Darwin on empathy'.

The consistently excellent history of neuroscience blog The Neuro Times has an interesting snippet about a case of a quack neurologist in 1875 Dublin.

In 1905 a French doctor wanted to see how long consciousness remained in a severed head and so did a rather morbid experiment at the execution of a beheaded prisoner. The remarkable report is linked from the Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

The observations were apparently made by a Dr Beaurieux who watched the execution of a prisoner named Henri Languille and immediately tried to get the attention of the severed head to see how it would react.

Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck...

I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. [...] It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: 'Languille!' I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again[...].

It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.

Apparently, this was also discussed in a brief article in a 1939 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association but I can't read it because my institution's subscription seems to be broken (off with their heads!).

The famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier is often said to have arranged an experiment before his execution where he would try and blink as many times as possible before his head finally died, but the story is apparently a myth.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mind Hacks reader jata for a link to the complete 1939 JAMA piece on decaptitation and consciousness which is available here.

Link to full copy of the report.
Link to Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

The August edition of The Psychologist has a fascinating article on the awareness during sleep paralysis, a state where we wake but can't move and sometimes experience intense hallucinations.

This form of awake sleep paralysis is remarkably common and has been explained throughout the world with a diverse and colourful range of cultural explanations.

In Newfoundland it's called the 'old hag', in Hong Kong 'ghost oppression', in Japan 'kanashibari' - the result of magic from a Buddhist spirit and famously, in Europe of the middle ages, the effect of the succubus demon. A recent study looked at the phenomenon among Mexican teens and found it was explained as 'a dead body climbed on top of me'.

The article also tackles science of this curious state and one of the most interesting bits is where it discusses the evidence for sleep paralysis being the intrusion of the rapid eye-movement (REM) stage of sleep into wakefulness.

It turns out that there are some people who experience REM almost immediately after falling asleep and they are much more likely to experience awareness during sleep paralysis:

This research strongly suggests that sleep paralysis is related to REM sleep, and in particular REM sleep that occurs at sleep onset. Shiftwork, jetlag, irregular sleep habits, overtiredness and sleep deprivation are all considered to be predisposing factors to sleep paralysis (American Sleep Disorders Association, 1997); this may be because such events disrupt the sleep–wake cycle, which can then cause SOREMPs [sleep-onset REM periods].

Of course, episodes of sleep paralysis occurring as people emerge from sleep cannot be explained in terms of SOREMPs, but it seems reasonable to argue that such episodes may well involve a similar state of consciousness, mixing aspects of both normal wakeful consciousness and REM consciousness. Needless to say, for practical reasons such episodes are inherently more difficult to study in psychophysiological terms as there is currently no known way to induce their occurrence.

Link to The Psychologist article 'Terror in the night'.

Full disclosure: I'm an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist. I have experienced sleep paralysis once and interpreted it as sleep paralysis.

A selection of objects described in the medical literature that have ended up in the brain via the nose:

A chopstick.

A ball-point pen.

A flying wire fragment.

A plastic stick.

A snooker cue.

A miniature fencing foil.

A gear stick.

There's an excellent article in the Boston Globe about 'grit' - the ability to stick with a task and persevere over a long period even when the going gets tough.

The article riffs on the work of psychologist Angela Duckworth who became interested in what attributes outside of intelligence contribute to success.

“I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of grit. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.”...

After developing a survey to measure this narrowly defined trait - you can take the survey at www.gritstudy.com - Duckworth set out to test the relevance of grit. The initial evidence suggests that measurements of grit can often be just as predictive of success, if not more, than measurements of intelligence. For instance, in a 2007 study of 175 finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that her simple grit survey was better at predicting whether or not a child would make the final round than an IQ score.

As the article notes, this concept of grit is not just perseverance, it's also about keeping relevant long-term goals in mind.

When psychologists have researched 'goal-directed action' in the past, they've almost always been thinking about the here and now. Reaching, immediate problem solving and short-term achievement.

This is slowly starting to change and some cognitive scientists are now attempting to understand the psychology and neuroscience of what we might call 'life goals'.

There's an interesting neuroimaging study in the latest issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that looked which brain areas are active when we're thinking about future events that are not personally relevant, compared to those that the individual holds as a personal goal.

The study extends previous work that indicates that our ability to imagine the future uses similar brain networks as our ability to remember the past, to the point where patients with dense amnesia have drastic impairments in picturing future events.

In the case of personal goals, it seems a similar network is involved, with the addition of the ventromedial and posterior cingulate areas, both frontal lobe regions previously linked to coding the emotional weight or value of an experience.

I've long suspected that 90% of real-world intelligence is motivation and a similar message seems to be emerging from the research.

Link to Boston Globe article 'The truth about grit'.

The New England Journal of Medicine has a brilliant research paper describing the first MRI scan capable of imaging the whole nervous system, plus a little something extra.

The technology is based on diffusion MRI, a technique which takes advantage of how water molecules move to separate out nerves from the rest of the body.

Water molecules bounce around inside all of the body tissues. Nerve fibres are long and thin, and so water molecules trapped inside are restricted in their movement - like jumping beans in a pipe.

Diffusion MRI works out which water molecules diffuse only along a fixed route (the nerves) and which are moving more freely (the rest of the body).

Of course, there could be some false positives in there, so the scan looks specifically for this diffusion effect only in tissue of the right density for nerve fibres.

Normal MRI scans are essentially density maps and to do this the scanner aligns the proton spins of the body's hydrogen atoms using huge magnets. It then fires off a electromagnetic pulse which knocks the spins out of alignment. As the spins return to alignment (called the 'relaxation time') a radio signal is given off which differs depending on the type of tissue. This can be read, mapped and turned into a scan.

As an analogy, imagine if you had compasses with lots of different liquids inside. They'd all point north, but you could knock them out of alignment by giving them a shake. Slowly the needles would return to north, but the liquid inside would affect how quickly they moved. Just by measuring the speed of return you could work out the density of the liquid. Treacle would take longer than oil, oil longer than water.

So if you restrict the scan only to pick out tissue with the same density as nerve fibres, that also only has water molecules moving along a single route, you've got a very high-tech nerve mapper.

The researchers tweaked this process for the whole body and produced the first scan of the entire nervous system which they called 'Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography'.

You may notice from the scans that as well as imaging the young man's nervous system, it also gives a remarkably good likeness of his cock.

As it turns out, the prostate, testes, and penis also hit the sweet spot of restricting water molecule diffusion while giving off a similar radio signal to nerves.

Action potential? Oh give over.

Link to 'Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography' (via @PsychTimes)

The Boston Globe has a short but interesting article on cerebral folding - the science of why the brain is wrinkled up like a damp walnut.

The wrinkled surface of the brain folds into 'ridges' known as gyri and the 'trenches' known as sulci. This rippled landscape forms perhaps the most recognisable aspect of the human brain but we still don't really know why we need this rather odd arrangement.

The standard answer "to fit more brain surface in the skull" really tells us nothing on its own as it's not clear why the same material in the outer brain layers couldn't be distributed differently.

Some answers are starting to emerge, however, not least from studies which look at differences in brain folding during the pre-birth growth phase and between people with different neurological conditions.

The article is full of fascinating findings from this research, not least of which is that the brain is smooth until quite late in pregnancy and only starts to fold in the last few months of development.

Premature babies seem to have this process partially disturbed for reasons that aren't yet clear:

For example, because so much of the folding takes place during the latter weeks of fetal development, premature infants arrive with much of their cortical development yet to be completed. And the folding patterns of preemies relegated to the neonatal intensive care unit don’t match those of their counterparts who spend their full nine months in the womb. New research from Van Essen’s lab shows that even when preemies reach their originally forecasted due dates, their brains are not as large or as folded as those of full-term newborns.

“That means there’s something different in how those brains are organized and in the connections that have formed,’’ Grant said. Perhaps some extra environmental influence in the hospital is disrupting folding or preemies are missing out on some vital influence that their counterparts get in the uterus, though researchers haven’t yet narrowed down what these influences may be.

The article is brief but is packed full of eye-opening discoveries on brain folding. It's one of those areas were we know so little but what we do know is quite compelling.

Link to Globe article 'Unfolding the mysteries of the brain'.

Oxytocin is usually described as the 'trust hormone' owing to its involvement in social bonding but a new study covered by Scientific American suggests it may have a wider role in human interaction as it has been found it increase feelings of envy and gloating.

The study, led by psychologist Simone Shamay-Tsoory, used a familiar format in oxytocin research. It asked participants to play a competitive game while half were given a nasal spray containing the hormone and half were given a placebo spray.

Although they thought they were playing another participant, in reality, they were playing a computer programmed to act in a certain way to elicit competitive emotions:

The computer was programmed to either win more money than the players to trigger feelings of envy, lose more money to elicit a form of gloating known as schadenfreude (delight over another's misfortune) or to win or lose equal amounts of money. To encourage these negative emotions, the researchers gave the computer player an arrogant "personality". They did this by asking the volunteers to appraise their chances of winning more money than the other player; although nearly all volunteers predicted 50–50 odds, they were told their opponents gave themselves an 80 percent chance of winning.

When compared with a placebo, volunteers who inhaled oxytocin said they felt greater levels of envy or gloating when they lost or won more money than the computer, respectively—findings the researchers detailed online July 29 in Biological Psychiatry. On the other hand, when the volunteers were questioned after the game, inhaling oxytocin apparently had no effect either following gains of equal amounts of money or on mood in general.

The researchers also measured mood in general and found no change, suggesting the increase in negative feelings toward others couldn't be explained as a general intensifying of emotions.

In their paper, they note several exceptions to the media stereotype that oxytocin is a 'hug hormone', citing studies that it increases aggression and territorial defence in some species. Also contrary to the cliché, a recent study [pdf] found it had no effect on empathy for other people's pain.

They conclude that, rather than being a something that promotes trust and bonding, oxytocin enhances all social emotions, including the good, the bad and the ugly.

Link to SciAm on oxytocin and envy study.
Link to abstract of study.

I've just found a remarkable paper with several cases of epilepsy that were interpreted as voodoo possession. They were all people with roots in Haiti, where voodoo is the predominant religion, and where spirit possession is considered a common spiritual event.

For thousands of years epilepsy has been explained as spirit possession in religions around the world. Epilepsy is also known to trigger intense religious or spiritual experiences in some people but the majority of cases are from the West and so have a distinctly Christian theme.

This 36-year-old woman had several years of recurrent complex partial seizures that manifested as a strong sense of fear and epigastric coldness, followed by loss of awareness, utterances of nonsensical phrases, and complex motor automatisms. The local mambo attributed the events to her being taken by “Melle Charlotte,” a french loa [spirit], with the nonsensical speech being interpreted as a foreign language.

It is said that during the possession by this spirit, a person will speak perfect French or other languages, even though in life, the person has no knowledge of that language. She continued to have seizures despite the mambo’s attempts to conjure the spirit. He explained his failure to the fact that Melle Charlotte is a very particular loa who makes only sporadic appearances. She was not treated with AEDs [anti-epileptic drugs] until she left Haiti at the age of 34.

An EEG revealed a right anterior temporal focus, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed right hippocampal atrophy. Seizures improved with carbamazepine (CBZ), although compliance with medication was a problem, largely because of family interference.

The cases are interesting as they highlight how easily the 'possession' theory fits with the unpredictable course of epilepsy and its effects when it seems to briefly 'take over' the body and mind of the affected person.

It raises the question of how much observations of epilepsy, a condition that affects approximately 1% of the population, have contributed to the idea of possession throughout the world.

Link to paper on epilepsy and Voodoo experiences.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The Neurocritic covers some fascinating research on how marathon runners could be a scientific window into the neuropsychology of trauma owing to the fact that they experience extremely high levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In their study, psychologists Teal Eich and Janet Metcalfe note that cortisol levels recorded 30 minutes after a marathon have been found to be similar to those in soldiers during military training and interrogation, rape victims just after the attack, severe burn injury patients and first-time parachute jumpers.

This suggests that marathon runners could be studied in a more systematic way than would would be ethical with victims of trauma, giving an important insight into the brain under extreme stress.

Eich and Metcalfe were particularly interested in the effect of stress on memory and wanted to see if there were any differences between explicit memory - memories that you can consciously call to mind, and implicit memory - the influence of past information on a task even if you're not aware of doing any remembering.

They tested a group of runners about half an hour after they completed a marathon and a group who were just about to run a marathon.

In comparison to the about-to-runs, those who had completed the marathon had worse explicit memory but better implicit memory. In other words, their conscious memory was reduced but their unconscious memory seemed to be sharper.

This is interesting because chronically high cortisol levels from trauma are thought to affect the hippocampus, a brain area known to be key in conscious memory. The researchers suggest that a similar process may be temporarily reducing explicit memory in runners.

The authors are a little more cautious in suggesting why implicit memory may have been improved, but one possibility is that cortisol is known to affect fear conditioning - the unconscious linking of fright with the situation it occurred in.

Interestingly, this is known to work differently in men and women. Cortisol boosts unconscious fear learning in men, but not women. The researchers didn't compare male and female marathon runners directly, but it would be interesting to know whether general unconscious learning that wasn't associated with fright was also sex-specific in their study.

There's more on the research over at The Neurocritic and the full text of the study is available online as a pdf if you want an in-depth look at the experiment.

Link to great write-up from The Neurocritic.
pdf of study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

This month's British Journal of Psychiatry has a poignant poem by Canadian poet and psychiatrist Ron Charach who muses on 'Psychiatrists on the Subway':

Apparently the poem is from his collection Selected Portraits that contains a number of other poems on psychiatry and mental illness.

Psychiatrists on the Subway

One rarely spots psychiatrists on the subway
rubbing the haze of a long day's sessions
from their lean temples,
or thumbing through paperbacks that deal
with anything-but.

Wouldn't they like an update on who's
In the world and how they're doing?
Or would the ridership be wary of men and women
whose briefcases rattle with the tic tac
of pills, whose ears perk
like armadillos' at conversations
two seats over?

More likely we locate them in a bad joke,
in a wing-chair beside a firm couch,
a suicide statistic, a product seminar
with deli sandwiches courtesy of Pfizer or Roche
or Eli Lilly;
perhaps on the beach of a convention hotel
with a panorama of thong-clad beauties
who seldom talk revealingly

Before bed a psychiatrist sets his ears
on the night-table
and prays for a night of long silence
from a god who prefers
to listen.

You can hear Charach himself reading poems from the collection, including 'Psychiatrists on the Subway' at this page. He reads in a calm deliberate manner which really suits the material.

Link to poem in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Link to Charach reading his poetry.

Science News has a fascinating article on people with gelotophobia, a fear of being laughed at. It seems the phobia might be driven by a problem in perceiving the social meaning of laughter, so even light-hearted chuckles are perceived as scornful snickers.

The piece covers the surprising amount of research on the phobia, tracing the perceptual problems from possible learnt responses during childhood to difficulties in picking up visual cues from body language.

To scientists’ surprise, those that scored high for fear of being laughed at didn’t react more strongly to the sounds of negative laughter than did those with no fear. The gelotophobes did, however, perceive positive laughter, such as hearty or cheerful laughter, as unpleasant or spiteful.

The scientists also measured participants’ moods before and after the experiment. Those with no fear of laughter reported feeling more cheerful after hearing the sound tracks, while gelotophobes reported no change in mood, the researchers reported in the February Humor.

Laughter is a remarkably complex form of social communication that is still not well understood by cognitive scientists although one of the best accessible explorations of the topic was in an edition of RadioLab from last year.

Link to Science News on 'When Humor Humiliates'.

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

Polyamory or having relationships with multiple, mutually consenting partners, is discussed in a feature article in Newsweek.

Copenhagen Business School are running an online survey asking for your opinion on the use of neuroscience in business and marketing.

Experimental philosophy and our moral intuitions are tackled in an article for The Psychologist.

H+ Magazine has more on morality and impressing the rules of war on autonomous http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/teaching-robots-rules-war">soldier robots.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses the psychology of overconfidence in an article for The New Yorker.

Slate has a somewhat polemic article on the recent dust-ups over the DSM-V 'new improved flavour' diagnostic manual due out in 2012. The Psychiatric Times blog also joins the fray.

A quarter of teenage girls mentally ill? Mental Nurse examines a recent article by the statistically challenged psychologist Oliver James.

The Guardian has a review of British psychologist Richard Bentall's new book on the trouble with psychiatry.

NPR Radio's Science Friday has a programme on the science of decision-making.

Neuroskeptic has some excellent coverage of a new Cochrane review finding that common plant St John's Wort is as effective as antidepressants, but seemingly, only if you're German.

A good cry doesn't always make you feel better. The not-always-cathartic process of crying is discussed by Jesse Bering in his great SciAm column.

The Boston Globe tackles the cognitive science of driving and how the ageing brain manages the mental demands of the road.

Sports psychology and the mental preparations of top class swimmers are covered by The New York Times.

Discover Magazine asks what urban sounds do to your brain, init?

Calendar calculating savants with autism - how do they do it? asks the brilliant BPS Research Digest.

The Guardian charts the rise of celebrity psychologists and quotes blogger Dr Petra.

Time-space synaesthesia - A cognitive advantage? Interesting new paper in Consciousness and Cognition.

Artist Kerry Tribe has some excellent photos from an exhibition on famous amnesic patient HM.

Time magazine has a piece on how family doctors can often miss http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1913312,00.html?xid=rss-health">depression in their patients.

TV can reduce loneliness, says research covered by SciAm's Mind Matters blog.

Cognitive Daily has some excellent coverage of an experiment that suggests we remember scenes by creating 3D models of them in our minds.

Psychologist Susan Blackmore has a thought-provoking if not somewhat speculative article in New Scientist on autonomous electronic machine memes.

Channel N finds a TED talk by Alain de Botton on the philosophy of tragedy and success.

The moral associations of colours are explored in research covered by The Economist.

Language Log finds a funny comic strip on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Eskimos.

Anyone who thinks science can't be beautiful or profound should spend an hour in the audio headspace of the latest RadioLab as it tackles life, death and mortality.

It contemplates how death has moved from the heart to the brain, the attempt to weigh souls, delusions of non-existence, digital immortality, neuroimaging for flickers of life, and a man who survived a suicide plunge that has killed almost everyone else who made the leap.

One highlight is a reading of an amazing short story from a book by neuroscientist David Eagleman in which he imagines 40 versions of the afterlife.

In this particular story, people live in a limbo after death where they exist while their names are still remembered by the living. While some leave this realm when they fade the collective consciousness, others become famous and are trapped, slave to their recollected selves that warp slowly over time as the living distort their memories.

Eagleman notes that it was inspired by the neuroscience of memory, which information is kept alive by being constantly re-represented in the brain.

As always, it's beautifully produced and hits. just. the. right. notes. for such a powerful subject.

There is probably no better way to spend an hour in the underworld.

Link to RadioLab edition 'After Life'.

New Scientist has as article arguing that the expansion in hominid brain size that occurred about two million years ago was due to the ice age which allowed an energy burning, heat generating brain to develop with sufficient environmental cooling.

Actually, it's worth a read as it's not as odd as it sounds, but it joins an ever growing list of theories that attempt to explain how our forebears 'suddenly' seemed to experience evolutionary brain expansion.

These include:

A diet high in meat.

A diet high in starch.

Social competition.

The development of cooking.

Essential fatty acids and schizophrenia.

An unspecified "special event".

The trouble with some of these theories is that they typically assume that brain size is always related to greater intelligence, which is not necessarily the case, and they don't always take into account the ratio of brain to body size, which seems to be more important than just brain size alone.

Interestingly, almost all the interest is on brain expansion and no-one seems particularly interested in the fact that the brain has shrunk about 10% since the Late Pleistocene, about 30,000 years ago.

You can have a great deal of fun coming up with evolutionary theories for that one. Just pick a key human activity that emerged around the same time.

Personally, I blame language, religion and karaoke.

Link to NewSci on brain science and the ice age.