Being Human

The BPS Research Digest has a fantastic feature where they've invited some of the world's leading psychologists to discuss one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.

Some take the challenge as a query about themselves as human beings, others about them personally, and the answers are a wonderful mix of the scientific and personal, the profound and ephemeral.

This is one of the many highlights, from social psychologist Norbert Schwartz, cursing his inability to detect his own biases:

One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts [pdf] – I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?

In fact, there are several pieces where psychologists gently bemoan their inability to apply their research findings to their own life, giving the series a slightly wistful feel.

Link to BPS Research Digest 'One nagging thing...' series.

One of the most influential and controversial papers in psychiatry was from a 1976 study published in The Lancet that found that people with schizophrenia had larger fluid filled ventricles in the brain.

Yesterday, I looked up the original paper in London's Institute of Psychiatry library and was amazed to see that the controversy seems ingrained into the paper copy, which has been ripped, repaired, damaged and defaced.

In the early days of scientific psychiatry, during the 1800s, many famous German psychiatrists expended a great deal of effort examining the post-mortem brains of patients with schizophrenia (also known at that time as dementia praecox) attempting to demonstrate Wilhelm Griesinger's theory that "all mental illness is disease of the brain."

Despite numerous studies, they were unable to replicate the success of studies on dementia, which they linked to specific changes in the brain. So for generations, schizophrenia came to be defined as a condition in which the brain was structurally normal.

This fact was often highlighted by the antipsychiatry movement to suggest that 'mental illness' was nothing more than a difference in human experience and there was no medical evidence supporting the work of psychiatrists.

But the fact was also cited by many psychiatrists resistant to the relatively new wave of medications that had appeared on the scene. The drugs were claimed to 'fix' the brain with the assumption that the discovery of clear evidence for brain differences would just be a matter of time.

Enter Eve Johnstone and her colleagues at Northwick Park Hospital in London, who, in the midst of this politically charged environment, completed a study that compared CAT brain scans of 18 patients with schizophrenia to a group of healthy control participants. Alongside the scans, the researchers also tested the participants' mental abilities with psychological tests.

The results were striking. They found the size of the ventricles, the fluid filled spaces in the brain, was, on average, larger in patients with schizophrenia and that it was correlated with the degree of difficulty with tests of memory, concentration and problem solving.

This caused enormous interest and controversy at the time. The paper copy from London's Institute of Psychiatry library clearly reflects this, as it has been read so many times (and possibly ripped out) that it is virtually in tatters and has been reattached with sticky tape in an otherwise pristine copy of the journal.

There are a few annotations on the page, including the word "Rubbish" written in the margin!

Although seminal, the study has been rightly criticised and one of the major difficulties with these sorts of studies is that because patients are normally taking antipsychotic medication, it's hard to distinguish where the effect is linked to schizophrenia or the treatment.

While some medication is thought to also thought to affect brain structure, a study on patients that have never taken medication seem to suggest some differences in ventricle size, on average, are still apparent.

The 'on average' bit is important though, as these differences are not present in everyone with the diagnosis. They're just an average difference when you compare a group of people with and without schizophrenia. Furthermore, we're still not quite sure of its significance.

So the topic is still as controversial as when Johnstone's study first appeared in 1976, although the argument has shifted from whether differences in the structure of the brain are associated with schizophrenia, to whether they are telling us anything useful.

Link to scan of article from Institute of Psychiatry library.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

I just found a curious case study of a man who developed 'robotic speech' after being hit by lightning. Rather than the "I am a Dalek!" style mechanical sound it seems to be more like the very. deliberate. and. exact. speech synthesis style, somewhat like Data from Star Trek the Next Generation

Lightning-induced robotic speech

Neurology. 1994 May;44(5):991-2.

To the Editor

Because of a recently observed case, I was intrigued by the communication of Cherington et al[1] concerning lightning encephalopathy. The authors referred to evidence by Critchley[2] that the cerebellum can be selectively injured in lightning-struck patients, Two of their there patients had signs of cerebellar dysfunction. MRI in one of their patients evidenced superior cerebellar atrophy.

The force of a lightning strike threw a 20-year-old roofer to the ground from the truck in which he was standing. Panicked, he immediately began to run. A numbness and weakness of his arms and back cleared after several days, but the more striking abnormality was a profound alteration of his speech, which he described as having become robotic. Each syllable was clearly enunciated with a slight pause between syllables, so that while the flow of his speech was slowed, he was able to communicate well. His speech was actually easier to comprehend than that of some normal persons. His brother had indeed complained that the patient's premorbid speech had been too rapid and word-jumbled; that speech was transformed to robotic speech, with fine diction and super-clear enunciation. Each morning, his speech was "normal" until shortly after he began to talk, when it reverted to the robotic pattern for the remainder of the day. The neurologic examination was normal except for right upper extremity hypalgesia. Brain MRI was normal.

I considered his robotic-speech problem to be most like the "scanning speech" of cerebellar disease. I have found no references to similar cases, but the reports of selective cerebellar injury by lightning strike[1-3] lead-me to suspect that robotic speech maybe a more common sequel than has been recognized.

Gordan J. Gilbeft, MD
St. Petersbutg, FL

1. Cherington M, Yarnell P, Hallmark D. MRI in lightning encephalopathy. Neurology 1993; 43(7):1437-8
2. Critchley M. Neurological effects of lightning and electricity. Lancet 1934;1:68–72
3. Morocutti C, Spadaro M, Amabile G. TRH treatment in cerebellar ataxia following a lighting stroke. Ital J Neurol Sci 1989;10:531.

The original authors reply and seemed somewhat baffled, saying that it could equally arise from the shock of the experience rather than damage to the brain.

Link to PubMed entry for case study.

Prospect magazine has an interesting article covering psychologist Irving Kirsch's widely publicised meta-analyses that have questioned whether Prozac-style SSRI antidepressants are any better than placebo.

Kirsch has become well known for requesting unpublished trial data via the US Freedom of Information Act and pooling it with the published evidence. The conclusion of his latest re-analysis was that there was little difference between sugar pills and SSRIs in the treatment of depression.

This has kicked up all sorts of merry hell, not least because the media reported (and the Prospect article implies) that 'antidepressants don't work' which is clearly false. They do work, but the debate is over how much of the effect is due to placebo.

It's not quite as simple as it seems of course, as not everyone agrees with Kirsch's methods and, as noted in an insightful 2008 paper, his argument is based on the assumption that people who respond to antidepressants also respond to placebo in a similar way, when we know there are individual variations in both.

Kirsch apparently has a book coming out shortly which is likely to restart the debate and it's likely to be heated.

There are some hints of this in the article where several prominent psychiatric scientists give variations on the "don't criticise the evidence, you're harming children!" argument. In fact, head of the NHS trust where my research institution is based apparently blames 'the media, and psychologists' "who have a vested interest in constantly attacking antidepressants". Yes, we've reached that level already.

We went through a very similar process when concerns over whether SSRIs increased suicidal thinking in adolescents were raised. Lots of similar mud-flinging ensued.

Interestingly, a meta-analysis of suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts in 372 trials just published in the British Medical Journal found that overall SSRIs had no effect on risk of self-harm, and that when the data was divided by age, there was a slight increase in thoughts and attempt in people younger than 25 and a slight decrease in adults aged over 65 (the comments on the article are also worth reading).

It's probably worth saying that even in young people self-harm when taking antidepressants is very rare, but the fact that the drugs had no overall protective effect except in older people should give us pause for thought.

But getting people to focus on the evidence when they're wound up is like getting people to focus on the fire exits during a strip show. We all accept the importance of doing so but few can quite manage it when the time comes.

Link to Prospect article on antidepressants (via @researchdigest)

The New York Times has an absolutely fantastic article on the psychology and neuroscience of anxiety and how an anxious temperament at birth can ebb and flow during our lifetime.

It's an in-depth article that really does justice to the topic, looking at extensive research into our anxious states, but also carefully questioning some of the sloppy assumptions of many article where brain activity is described as directly representing mental states.

But having all the earmarks of anxiety in the brain does not always translate into a subjective experience of anxiety. “The brain state does not make it a disorder,” Kagan told me. “The brain state exists, and the statement ‘I’m anxious,’ exists, and the correlation is imperfect.” Two people can experience the same level of anxiety, he said, but one who has interesting work to distract her from the jittery feelings might do fine, while another who has just lost his job spends all day at home fretting and might be quicker to reach a point where the thrum becomes overwhelming. It’s all in the context, the interpretation, the ability to divert your attention from the knot in your gut.

The article is incredibly well written and it tackles a huge range of topics in the understanding of fear and anxiety. Highly recommended.

Link to NYT article 'Understanding the Anxious Mind' (via @mocost)

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

USA Today has an interesting piece on how social networking sites are becoming research targets in health and psychology.

The oft-replicated finding in relationship research that, on average, women would be most hurt by romantic betrayal and men by sexual betrayal, is covered by Cognitive Daily.

New Scientist discusses a new imaging study that highlights the importance of the hippocampus in conceptual learning.

Love is a like a zoom lens, according to The Guardian. Sex is like a microscope, or an oscilloscope, depending on what you're in to.

The New York Times has a piece on increased rates of dementia seen in American football players and how the NFL are trying to downplay the data.

Do people really lie three times within 10 minutes of meeting someone new? asks PsyBlog questioning the common statistic.

Time reports on a study finding that social comparisons with thin people who are big eaters can lead people to choose larger food portions.

Gamers are more aggressive to strangers, says New Scientist who clearly haven't read the study which didn't measure aggression to anyone.

Time magazine has another good article on how frequency of email contact can be modelled with a remarkable simple mathematical formula.

Religion protects against drug use in dance. Doping in ballroom dancing, who knew? (apart from Jesus)

Furious Seasons covers a new study finding that the majority of psychiatric drugs are prescribed by family doctors.

I wish I could be at the Encultured Brain conference, organised by the chaps from the excellent Neuroanthropology blog.

The Globe and Mail covers research on how women's attitudes to their genitals is linked to orgasm frequency and health behaviour.

The development of implantable electronic http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/health/research/27eye.html?em=&pagewanted=all">retinas is covered by The New York Times.

Both the British and American psychology associations have just launched their respective history of psychology websites.

New Scientist covers an overly melodramatic promo video by charity Autism Speaks and the spoof videos by people with autism.

The limits of a universal view of mental illness are discussed by Frontier Psychiatrist.

Psychiatric Times has concluded a three part series on the science behind fMRI brain scanning experiments.

Can the right kinds of play teach self-control in children? asks The New York Times as it discusses a radically different approach to child behaviour.

BBC News reports on a new study of treatment for drug addicts in the UK and finds treatment programme successes are encouraging.

Anticipating an interaction with an obese person provokes feelings of social power, reports the BPS Research Digest.

The Neurocritic has a neurogasm which looks more like a shampoo bottle than a drink but Paris Hilton is having one so it must be science, right?

The interesting origins of the British Prime Minister on antidepressants so what poppycock is tackled by Neuroskeptic.

Stephen Colbert did a brilliantly funny piece on his show the other night, tackling the introduction of 'snus' to the USA, tobacco pouches that fit under the lip, and the increasing placebo effect, a topic which we discussed recently.

Colbert tries the snus pouches on the programme, which, I have to say, seem remarkably uninviting, and riffs on the health benefits of sugar pills with plenty of laughs.

Link to Stephen Colbert clip (thanks Veronica!)

I've happened upon an interesting snippet from the regular Nature "100 years ago" feature concerning a 1907 debate on whether insanity was really increasing or whether it just seemed that way due to changes in diagnosis and treatment methods.

It made me smile because it is almost exactly the same argument that is being had now about whether cases of autism are genuinely increasing or whether this just reflects changes in diagnosis and treatment methods:

Notwithstanding the much improved statistics recently issued by the Lunacy Commissioners, thoroughly satisfactory materials are still wanting for solving the question whether the prevalence of insanity is or is not increasing. The importance of the problem... imparts special interest to a paper by Mr. Noel A. Humphreys on the alleged increase of insanity... This paper shows in a striking manner the value of scientific statistics in checking crude figures.

The author expresses a decided opinion that there is no absolute proof of actual increase of occurring insanity in England and Wales, and that the continued increase in the number and proportion of the registered and certified insane is due to changes in the degree and nature of mental unsoundness for which asylum treatment is considered necessary, and to the marked decline in the rate of discharge (including deaths) from asylums.

From Nature 18 July 1907.

Link to Nature "100 years ago" snippet.
Link to Wikipedia page on epidemiology of autism.

The Scientific American Mind blog Mind Matters has a fantastic article on the links between love and creativity and how just thinking of a romantic relationship can have an immediate effect on creative thinking.

The piece covers several studies which have shown that love or the concept of love promotes a 'big picture' thinking style while thinking of a quick shag seems to do the reverse:

The clever experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.

Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the "here and now". Consistent with this idea, when the researchers asked people to imagine a romantic date or a casual sex encounter, they found that those who imagined dates imagined them as occurring farther into the future than those who imagined casual sex...

A global processing style promotes creative thinking because it helps raise remote and uncommon associations.

Clearly there is a happy medium to be found here, and I have to say, "would you like me to balance your processing styles?" has the makings of a great chat-up line.

Link to Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative? (via Frontal Cortex)

A fascinating study just published in the medical journal Pain examined the side-effects reported by patients taking placebos in clinical trials to test migraine drugs. It found that side-effects from placebo were almost as common as from the actual drug, but most interestingly, were specific to side-effects you would expected from the comparison medication.

In other words, the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on anticonvulsant drugs closely resemble side-effects you get from anticonvulsants and are different from the side-effects you get from a sugar pill in a study on pain killers, which more closely resemble pain killer side-effects.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Martina Amanzio, looked at trials for three type of migraine drugs: NSAIDs (like aspirin), triptans that work on the serotonin system, and anticonvulsant drugs more often used to treat epilepsy.

Side-effects from placebo are known as the nocebo effect and just the combined list of side-effects from the placebo groups in this study is surprising enough:

abdominal pain, anorexia or/and weight loss, attention difficulties, burning or/and flushing, chest discomfort, chills, diarrhea, dizziness, dry mouth, dyspepsia, fatigue, heaviness, injection side reaction, insomnia, language difficulties, memory difficulties, nasal signs and symptoms, nausea, numbness, paresthesia or/and tingling, pharyngitis, somnolence or/and drowsiness, stinging or/and pressure sensation, taste disturbance, tinnitus, upper respiratory tract infection, vomiting, weakness

It turns out that when placebo was being compared to an anticonvulsant, side-effects more common in these drugs - like fatigue, reduced appetite, sleepiness and tingling sensations - were more common in the placebo. In contrast, stomach upsets and dry mouth were more common in the placebo group when the comparison was with NSAID painkillers, which more often cause these symptoms themselves.

One explanation may be that before taking part in a clinical trial, patients are informed of the possible side-effects that the active drug may cause, regardless of whether they are going to be given placebo or the actual medication.

Information on the possible side-effects will be specific to the real medication, and, as we know that expectation plays a big part in the placebo effect, it is probably also shaping the nocebo effect and leading to the production of symptoms through expectancy.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

An extraordinary 2006 article from The New York Times profiles ultra-endurance cyclist Jure Robič who apparently regularly loses his sanity during his races - literally becoming psychotic as he pushes himself to the limit.

The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback...

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

It's a wonderfully written article that touches on the man himself, the physiology of fatigue and the psychological strain of intense athletic feats.

Link to NYT article on Jure Robič.

I've just found this remarkable TV interview with Oliver Sacks from 1986, only a year after the publication of his famous book A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It's a fascinating discussion, not least because it's something you don't see much these days - an extended interview that focuses solely on a neuroscientist and his work.

There are no gimmicks or attempts to jazz it up with fancy editing and graphics. We see everything during the discussion, including Sacks' many 'ums' and 'ahs' and even hear a telephone going off half way through!

Still, it's a really wide ranging discussion which covers everything from the effects of brain injury to the role of doctors in exploring their patients' lives.

From what I can make out, the interviewer is Harold Channer who did the piece for a Manhattan-based public access TV network probably before Sacks became well-known.

The video quality is a bit ropey but Sacks has a spectacular beard and is as chaotically engaging as ever. Classic stuff.

Link to Oliver Sacks interview from 1986.

Time magazine has a remarkably one-sided article on America's first 'internet addiction' clinic. The clinic turns out to be a few rooms in someone's house, but the article gives away an interesting if not depressing gem about the likely status of the 'internet addiction' diagnosis in the DSM-V, the next version of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual:

"The central issue is the absence of research literature on this," says Dr. Charles O'Brien, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Studies in Addiction and the current chair of the DSM-V committee to revise the manual, adding that with the backdrop of the health-care debate, now is a precarious time to introduce new disorders that will require more money to treat.

"At this point I think it's appropriate that it's not considered an official disease," says O'Brien. "We are probably going to mention it in the appendix."

The appendix refers to Appendix B, which is a list of diagnoses worthy of future study, and yes, that's the head of the DSM addiction committee saying that an "absence of research literature" makes something worthy of future study.

In which case, I might write to him and ask to have my own diagnosis of "impulsive diagnosis inclusion syndrome" listed on the same basis.

But not only is his reasoning rather odd, he's also wrong. There's quite a sizeable literature on the 'internet addiction' diagnosis and, as noted by a meta-analysis published last year, it turns out to be rubbish.

If you're interested in reading something a little more balanced, I get to spar with Kimberley Young, one of the long-standing 'internet addiction' promoters, in an article in this month's Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Link to Time on America's first 'internet addiction' clinic.
Link to 'internet addiction' scrap in CMAJ.

The 76th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience carnival has just appeared on the Neuroskeptic blog and is packed full of mind and brain goodness.

A couple of my favourites include an excellent piece from Providentia about the violin prodigy Josef Hassid whose career was cut short by a brain tumour, and another is a great post on AK's Ramblings about counter-intuitive labels in neuroscience.

A whole lot more mind and brain writing awaits, all bang up-to-date and hot off the press.

Link to Encephalon 76.

The Psychologist has an excellent article on the psychology behind the classic children's book Where The Wild Things Are. It turns out that the author, Maurice Sendak, was heavily interested in psychoanalysis and intended the book to explore the inner life of children.

The article is by psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb who examines some of the influences on the book and Sendak's other works, noting that the author was in analysis himself and had an analyst as his life partner.

There is a remarkable thematic coherence to much of Sendak’s work, and this coherence links creative efforts that are decades apart and, additionally, links these works to what is known about his early life and formative years. Sendak himself has commented on his single-minded focus, saying, ‘I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is How do children survive?’ But it is more than mere survival that Sendak aspires to, for his children and for himself. He asks the question of resilience: How do children surmount and transform in order to prosper and create? It is tempting to imagine that Sendak conceives of the trajectory of his own life and art as a model for the way he has handled these questions in his works.

By the way, the whole issue of The Psychologist is freely available online, albeit as a slightly unwieldy Flash application.

It's one of the best issues I can remember for a long time. You may want to check out an excellent article on the default network, an interview with Chris Frith, a piece on the psychology of storytelling or a review of recent discussions on the next big questions in psychology.

Link to The Psychologist on Where The Wild Things Are.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist. I read Where The Wild Things Are as a child and loved it.

I've just discovered that probably one of the best series ever produced on philosophy is available on Google Video. The BBC series Human All Too Human includes three fantastic programmes on Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger - a trio of controversial thinkers who massively influenced 20th century philosophy.

It's an interesting choice as all had fascinating and turbulent lives - Nietzsche ending his life in insanity, Heidegger a unrepentant Nazi defended by a Jewish ex-lover, and Sartre who walked the line between free love and womanising.

All had a huge influence on psychology at various stages, and you can clearly see how many struggled with concepts of mind and society.

The programmes tackle both the characters and their theories and are some of the most engaging and gripping programmes I've ever seen on philosophy, an essential subject that usually gets little more than satire or lip service from mainstream media.

They're an hour each and worth every minute. Put some time aside, find a comfy chair and enjoy.

Link to programme on Jean Paul Sartre.
Link to programme on Martin Heidegger.
Link to programme on Friedrich Nietzsche.

'From Stroboscope to Dream Machine: A History of Flicker-Induced Hallucinations' is a wonderful article that has just appeared in medical journal European Neurology. It charts how an early finding in visual neuroscience was adopted by the Beat writer William Burroughs and became a fixture of the psychedelic sixties.

Flicker induced hallucinations have been noted throughout history and typically occur when a strong light flashes between 8 and 12hz, also known as the alpha rhythm. They most commonly trigger a type of hallucination called a form constant that comprises of geometric shapes and patterns.

Alpha rhythms have been heavily linked to the function of the occipital lobe and, as we suspect from recent research, 'inputting' alpha waves into the visual system via flickers seems to cause hallucinations by knocking a deep brain structure called the thalamus and the occipital lobe out of sync.

As both are part of the visual system, the effect is a bit like knocking a conversation out of sync - misperceptions occur.

Burroughs happened upon the phenomenon and set about creating a machine to produce these hallucinations:

The flicker phenomenon reminded Burroughs of a story he had recently been told by his soul mate Brion Gysin (1916-1986). At the time they both inhabited a cheap hotel in 9, rue Gît Le Coeur, a small alley in the middle of the Latin Quarter of Paris. The place has been known as the Beat Hotel ever since. Gysin was a man with many skills; he was a painter, a poet, a calligrapher, a musician and a cook, all in one lifetime.

On December 21, 1958, as his diary reports, he had been travelling on a bus in southern France. He had fallen asleep, leaning with his head against the window pane. On passing by a row of trees, sunlight came flickering through and Gysin started to hallucinate:

'an overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. The vision stopped abruptly when we left the trees. Was that a vision?'.

Gysin knew by experience what neurophysiologists like Walter were talking about. Burroughs was able to hand him the theoretical framework.

The next step was to manufacture a stroboscope for private use. Gysin persuaded one of his friends, Ian Sommerville (1940-1976), to make one. Sommerville, who was originally a mathematician, came up with a simple but effective design

This was later developed into the commercially produced dreammachine, essentially a light with a rotating slotted lampshade designed to produced flickers in the alpha range. It became popular as both a way of inducing hallucinations on its own and as an aide to hallucinogenic drug trips.

There are plans online from a company who still make the machines to order.

The hallucinations don't occur in everyone (in fact, I've probably spent a few hours of my life in front of a frequency controlled strobe trying to trigger the effect with no luck) and in people with photosensitive epilepsy the flickers can trigger seizures.

The effect is almost unknown in the psychedelic circles circles in which it was once popular, but has now been adopted by neuroscientists wanting a lab-based method to research hallucinations.

If you're interested in reading more about the whole fascinating story, I can't recommend the short but fascinating book Chapel of Extreme Experience enough.

Link to full-text of article on flicker hallucinations.
Link to DOI entry for same.

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

Is the Internet melting our brains? asks Slate of author Dennis Baron who says no, it's just another cycle in the human history of technology distrust.

Neurophilosophy discusses recent research on how patients in the coma-like persistent vegetative state can show conditioned learning and that those that day are more likely to show recovery.

Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach discusses the psychology and politics of the body on ABC Radio National's Saturday Extra.

TED Blog has an interesting interview with Oliver Sacks relating to his recent talk on hallucinations.

Thank you Developing Intelligence for being of the few places not to fall for the 'fMRI of dead fish is an example of a voodoo correlation' red herring. They're different effects and the DevIntel post discusses the difference.

Neuroanthropology has an excellent and somewhat philosophical post on mind body duality in the treatment of combat-related PTSD.

Free will is not an illusion after all, much to the surprise of New Scientist who report on new research suggesting an alternative interpretation to Libet's famous brain activation before conscious intention to move study.

The BPS Research Digest covers research on how your personality type affects the situations you place yourself in. One of many excellent post from the BPSRD this week.

ABC Radio National's Ockham's Razor discusses the many illness of dictionary creator Dr Samuel Johnson. You may be interested to know that another major contributor was William Chester Minor who wrote many definitions as a patient in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

PsyBlog has an excellent post on how long it takes to form a habit.

A photograph of your loved one can reduced pain intensity according to a study covered by Neuronarrative.

New Scientist ">covers research on how different alleles of the COMT gene are associated with exam performance. Ignore the 'gene for x' nonsense and it's actually quite an interesting article.

Welcome to the rehab center from the future via a humorous photo gallery from Wired.

Neuroskeptic covers a fascinating case study of a man with a missing limbic system.

Another interesting advance in the still limited field of 'brain scan mind reading' is covered by Wired.

Cognition and Culture has a short piece on how to think, say, or do precisely the worst thing for any occasion.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the shocking news that treating your employees well increases their productivity.

When does consciousness emerge? The Splintered Mind has a brilliantly thought-provoking post on the emergence of the conscious mind in individuals and species.

The Neurocritic has a piece on a recent but necessarily speculative paper on the neuroscience of torture and the negative effects on accurate memory recall.

There is a cliché in media stories where figures for a disease or condition are quoted followed by a statement that "the true figures may be higher". Sampling errors mean that initial figures are equally as likely to be under-estimates as over-estimates but we only ever seem to be told that the condition is under-detected.

For example, this is from a recent (actually pretty good) New Scientist article about gender identity disorder (GID) in children, a condition where children who are biologically male feel female and vice versa:

It is unclear how common GID is among children, but many transsexual adults say they felt they were "in the wrong body" from an early age. The incidence of adult transsexualism has been estimated at about 1 in 12,000 for male-to-females, and around in 1 in 30,000 for female-to-males, although transsexual lobby groups say the true figures may be far higher.

These estimates are usually drawn from prevalence studies where a maybe a few hundred or thousand people are tested. The researchers extrapolate from the number of cases to make an estimate of how many people in the population as a whole will have the condition.

These estimates are made with statistical tests which give a margin of error, meaning that within a certain range, typically described by confidence intervals, the real figure is likely to be between a range which equally includes both higher and lower values than the quoted amount.

For any individual study you can validly say that you think the estimate is too low, or indeed, too high, and give reasons for that. For instance, you might say that your sample was mainly young people who tend to be healthier than the general public, or maybe that the diagnostic tools are known to miss some true cases.

But when we look at reporting as a whole, it almost always says the condition is likely to be much more common than the estimate.

For example, have a look at the results of this Google search:

"the true number may be higher" 20,300 hits

"the true number may be lower" 3 hits

You can try variations on the phrasing and see the same sort of pattern emerges. I'm curious as to why this bias occurs, or whether there's another explanation for it.

Last year I posted about a wonderful film called The English Surgeon, a sublime documentary about the work of neurosurgeons Henry Marsh and Igor Kurilets in the Ukraine. It turns out you can now watch it for free online at the PBS website until 9th October.

As I mentioned last time "to say the film was just about brain surgery would be vastly under value its significance, and to describe it as a meditation on the humanity of medicine would be to confine it to a cliché."

As far as I can work out, it should be available wherever you are in the world.

By the way, it turns out that Henry Marsh is the husband of social anthropologist Kate Fox who wrote the book Watching the English that we discussed earlier, so interesting to see that Marsh embodies many typical English traits.

Link to The English Surgeon online (via @mocost @balajajian).