Being Human

The Fortean Times has an article and some fantastic excerpts from a new encyclopaedia on mass hysteria, social panics and fast moving fads called Outbreak: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behaviour.

The book tackles some of the most curious and surprising outbreaks from medieval times to the present day, covering everything from medieval dancing plagues to modern day penis theft panics to the worldwide hula-hoop craze of 1958.

It's by sociologists Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew both of whom are well known for their work on how unusual beliefs and experiences are shaped by culture. However, mass hysterias and the like and still one of the most mysterious aspects of human psychology.

There have been many attempts to account for the kinds of outlandish collect­ive behaviour that so fascinate forteans – the book provides entries on many of these related theories and explan­ations, from Altered States of Consciousness and Anxiety to False Memory Syndrome, Hysteria and Psychosomatic Phenomena. Many once-favoured ideas don’t really stand up to much scrutiny: consider the fad among 19th-century physicians for ‘curing’ masturbators with bizarre surgical ‘intervention’ and for terrifying their hapless patients with the prospect of bodily ruin and eternal damnation. It could be argued that none of the theories that have been put forward – even the more promising ones – actually applies in all cases.

Ultimately, it’s clear there is no consensus on just why human behaviour should include such anomalies, or how and why they occur. Just possibly, they may be pathological forms of the more healthy processes that cement our personal and social lives and which are only noticed when they go wrong. In many cases, the best that can be done is to understand the local social, political and cultural dynamics, but even so the causes of many such outbreaks remain obscure. This is important, because such erratic collective behaviour casts an awful shadow over human history, and we are no closer to understanding it now than Mackay was in 1841.

In fact, Bartholomew wrote one of my favourite books of all time. Called Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illnesses and Social Delusion (ISBN 0786409975) it was the first book that made me wake up to the power of social influence on individual psychology.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I was sent a PDF of the new encyclopaedia some months ago in the hopes that I would write some blurb for the back, which I was more than happy to do as it is a wonderfully complete collection of social curiosities.

The Fortean Times article has some great excerpts covering an outbreak of feinting in a marching band in 1973 Alabama (a classic case of mass hysteria), an outbreak of cat-like meowing in India in 2004, the 1958 hula-hoop craze, a goblin scare that affect Zimbabwe in 2002, a 'culture bound syndrome' with the unusual name of the jumping Frenchmen of Maine from the 18th and 19th centuries, various outbreaks of fears about chemtrails, a giant earthworm hoax that panicked a Texas town in 1993, and a version of Orson Well's War of the Worlds that caused widespread rioting in Ecuador in 1949.

And if you want more on 'mass hysteria', I highly recommend a 2002 article from the British Journal of Psychiatry by Bartholomew and psychiatrist Simon Wessely.

Link to Fortean Times article 'Outbreak!'
Link to more details on the book.
Link to BJP article on mass psychogenic illness.

A couple of days ago, Olivia Judson discussed the effects on science writing of the execrable state of English libel law, with some details of the British Chiropractic Association's libel case against Simon Singh, and a bit about Mattias Rath's case against Ben Goldacre: "Cracking the Spine of Libel", NYT, 9/15/2009. There's an excellent list of links at the end of her post.

We discussed a central linguistic aspect of the case against Singh here a few months ago ("Knowing bogosity", 4/11/2009).

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Following up on Mark's post about William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve," I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I've been able to piece it together. The brief story can be found in my Aug. 21 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "The Lexicon of the Health Care Debate." What follows is the long story.

The idea that the rise of something undesirable can be altered by "bending the curve" has been around for quite a while. Here is an unnamed writer in the midst of World War I, optimistically predicting that "the progress of science" will "bend the curve more rapidly toward the base line of permanent 'peace on earth and good will to men'" (where the curve is understood as a graph of the frequency of wars over time):

"The Progress of Science: Substitutes for War" (anon.)
The Scientific Monthly (Oct. 1915), p. 101
The writer of this note has determined the proportion of each century in which the leading nations have been engaged in war. The curve thus found has no great reliabilty, for it does not take into account the percentages of the peoples concerned, but its course clearly indicates that even under circumstances as they have been, wars will come to an end. And there is good reason to believe that the new condition — universal education and universal suffrage, democratic control, improved economic conditions of living for the people, the scientific attitude — will tend to bend the curve more rapidly toward the base line of permanent "peace on earth and good will to men."

Here, in a 1941 article, "bending the curve" is used to refer to a shift in popular opinion (in favor of Darwinism):

"Darwinism Comes to America, 1859-1900″ by Bert James Loewenberg
The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (Dec. 1941), p. 360
Shifting values as well as scholarly approval and popular diffusion bent the curve in the direction of general assent.

And here, in 1945, a proponent of "cosmic humanism" (a precursor to
the New Age movement) says that his utopian group is "committed to the
task of bending the curve of social change into an upward-spiralling
urge toward planetary integration" (whatever that means!):

"An Institute of Scientific Humanism" by Oliver L. Reiser
Philosophy of Science (Apr. 1945), p. 51
In a real sense, therefore, we are committed to the task of bending the curve of social change into an upward-spiralling urge toward planetary integration, the attainment of which alone can satisfy man's "hunger for wholiness [sic]."

In the realm of public policy, "bending the curve" has been used for the past couple of decades to refer to how policy adjustments can help reverse unwelcome trends. Often the "curve" in question charts rising spending or costs. A few examples from the '90s:

Fortune, Feb. 8, 1993
Now Bill Clinton wants to bend the curve of spending still lower.

The Plain Dealer, Nov. 20, 1994
"We're working toward a huge gap in revenues," [Frank] Mosier said. "Unless we're able to bend the curve and increase economic development in this state … we're going to be paying big-time taxes in 10 years."

The Washington Post, Aug. 15, 1996
"The environmental community feels very strongly that we need to bend the curve" by focusing intense development near existing roads and transit lines, [Jim] Hogan said.

A 1998 study on global sustainability used the phrase in its title:

Bending the Curve: Toward Global Sustainability by Paul Raskin et al.
(Stockholm Environment Institute, 1998)
This study shows how a comprehensive set of policy reforms could bend the curve of development toward sustainability.

With respect to health care policy, "bending the (cost) curve" was already in use by congressional Republicans in 2003 to refer to their Medicare prescription-drug legislation:

CongressDaily, Mar. 6, 2003
Agreed House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairwoman Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., "We have to bend the cost curve as the baby boomers retire" or else Medicare could turn into Medicaid.

Washington Times, Nov. 21, 2003
Republican leaders have defended the bill as the best they could get, but also said they believe it will be enough to bend the cost curve downward.

Inside CMS, Jan. 29, 2004
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) often touted the chronic care provisions of the legislation as being key to "bending the cost curve in the out-years" when promoting the bill in Congress last fall.

The latest usage by members of Congress and the Obama administration seems to have arisen from a benchmark report published in December '07 by The Commonwealth Fund: "Bending the Curve: Options for Achieving Savings and Improving Value in U.S. Health Spending." And for more on the recent popularization of the expression in health care policy discussions, check out Daniel Libit's July 24 Politico article, "Move over, David Beckham. Bend it like Peter Orszag!"

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I always assumed the question of whether people deaf from birth could hear hallucinated voices was similar to the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if no-one is there, but it turns out that there have been several studies on auditory hallucinations in deaf people.

In fact, I've just read a remarkable paper that reports ten case studies of people who became deaf before they learnt language and who report hearing voices as part of a psychotic mental illness. And this isn't the only study, PubMed has several more.

I always assumed that a born-deaf person would hallucinate signs instead (and apparently, this has also been reported) but this study carefully asked the people concerned about and they seemed to be clear that they were 'hearing' the voices.

In one of the most interesting bits in the study they asked the deaf patients how they could 'hear' voices when they were deaf:

Although the patients werc only rated as having auditory hallucinations if they were emphatic that they heard voices rather than received information in some other way, and several gave the sign for talking, questioning about how they were able to hear, being deaf, was typically uninformative. Most commonly the patients merely shrugged, gave a 'don't know' reply, or indicated that they could not understand the question.

Others made attempts at explanation which were superficial, facile or otherwise unsatisfactory, such as 'maybe talking in my brain,' or 'sometimes I'm deaf, sometimes I hear'. One patient argued that he could hear music if he turned it up loud (which probably represented perception of vibration), and implied that the same was true for speech. Still others made untrue or delusional claims that they could hear or used to be able to hear.

Such patients made statements like ‘I’m not deaf‘, or ‘I can hear on one side, on the right’, or ‘I used to be able to hear a little, a year ago’. One patient, who was diagnosed as deaf at the age of 2 years, stated that she could hear before the age of 5 years, but then she hit a brick wall and became deaf. One patient believed that his hearing had been restored by God.

These sorts of seemingly half-hearted explanations are not uncommon in patients with delusional syndromes. For example, if you ask a patient who is paralysed after brain damage but is unaware of it (something called anosognosia) to lift their hand they can often give answers like "it's fine where it is" or "I can't be bothered right now" while continuing to claim that they could move it if they wanted.

I notice a recent article criticises the idea that deaf people can hear voices saying that the interpretation of these hallucinatory experiences relies on hearing people imposing their ideas onto what they've been told. In the case studies above some of the deaf people clearing and unambiguously signed that they 'heard' the voices but sadly I don't have access to this critical article so can't say quite how convincing this argument is.

On a related note, I've heard several people discuss whether blind people could experience 'visual' hallucinations (usually in reference to LSD) but I've had no luck finding any reports of this.

Link to study of hallucinated voices in deaf people.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

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The New York Times has a brilliant article on how human traits and behaviours, including everything from happiness to obesity, can spread through social networks.

It discusses the findings of the Framington Heart Study. Originally designed to be a study of heart disease in a small American town, it recorded each participant's family and friends in case the researchers lost touch with anyone.

This data allowed sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler to reconstruct the social networks of the participants and test how family, work and friendship connections affected the spread of things like happiness, obesity and smoking. Their data suggests that even quite nebulous experiences like happiness 'travel' through our web of relationships, as we discussed when they released this study last year.

Coincidentally Wired has also just published an article on the same topic which has some of the stunning network maps from the study, but I really recommend reading the New York Times in full as it is not solely on this one study, it also serves as a nuanced discussion about the usefulness and limitations of social network analysis.

Not least is the difficulty of judging to what extent these effects 'travel' through relationships or how much the 'birds of a feather' effect means similar people just flock together.

You need to understand social network analysis because it is becoming one of the most powerful method to understand human behaviour. As we've discussed before, the fact that digital communications technology is so common means that we're constantly creating data trails that can reveal surprising amounts of intimate information with relatively simple methods.

For example, the BPS Research Digest just covered a study that could infer about 95% of friendships just from looking at location data from mobile phones - something that is one of the most basic information trails in the rich data stream automatically produced by social media.

This approach to understanding human networks is also likely to be increasingly important for human science. The last few decades have seen a massive increase in understanding on how genetics influences our minds and behaviour and social network analysis will see us increasingly linking individual discoveries from biology and cognitive science to the role of our relationships in our lives.

Link to NYT piece 'Is Happiness Catching?'
Link to Wired piece 'The Buddy System'.
Link to Mind Hacks on 'The distant sound of well-armed sociologists'.

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Here's the first sentence of William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve":

Taking on the issue of the cost of health care, a Washington Post editorialist intoned recently that “knowing more about which treatments are effective is essential” — knowing about when to use a plural verb is tough, too — “but, without a mechanism to put that knowledge into action, it won’t be enough to bend the cost curve.”

The phrase in boldface blue was too much for reader Anthony Ambrosini:

Am I missing something?  Which with a plural verb just implies a plural response to the question, and I doubt he thinks that knowing should take a plural verb.  What's he on about?

I'm just as puzzled as Anthony is. Safire's parenthetical remark is true, more or less, but the maxim of quantity dictates that it should have some minimal relevance to its context. And this would imply either that the quoted phrase (“knowing more about which treatments are effective is essential”) involves an error in verb agreement (surely false), or that the quoted phrase is a case where it's especially tricky to determine verb plurality (also apparently false, unless you're borderline aphasic).

So come on, LL readers, help us out. Is Safire starting to have problems with linguistic impulse control? Is he using the aleatoric compositional methods pioneered by John Cage and Price Stern Sloan? Or is there some simple exegesis that we're missing?

One thing about Safire's column remains consistent — the failure of his staffers to do the research that he pays them for (or his failure to pay attention to the research they do):

Why has curve-bending become such a popular sport? Because the language is in the grip of graphs. The graphic arts are on the march as “showing” tramples on “explaining,” and now we are afflicted with the symbols of symbols. As an old Chinese philosopher never said, “Words about graphs are worth a thousand pictures.”

The first straight-line challenge to the muscular line-benders I could find was in the 1960s, when the power curve was first explained to me by a pilot.

The OED has citations for power curve going back to 1908:

1908 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) A. 207 441 When the pressure observations are plotted to a suitable scale they coincide with the integrated power curve. 1934 Times 27 May 8/7 This Riley engine in acceleration is rapid and clean, it never fusses or vibrates, and the power curve must be a good one, for the engine capacity, throughout its range.

And there are plenty of other cgraphical curve-collocations earlier than 1960, e.g.:

1886 K. PEARSON in I. Todhunter Hist. Theory Elasticity I. 503 There exist certain materials for which even in a state of ease the *stress-strain relation is not linear; that is to say the stress-strain curve..is not a straight line even for very small elastic strains.

Though in fairness, I don't think that stress-strain curve has ever had much of a second life as a metaphorical expression.

I imagined that bell curve was an old expression, but the OED's first citations are from 1970 and 1973:

1970 Balance Sheet Oct. 64/2 Research may be used to classify the effort into three basic methods:..(2) through use of the normal distribution hypothesis (*bell curve) [etc.]. 1973 T. PYNCHON Gravity's Rainbow I. 51 Exit doors painted beige, but with edges smudged browner in bell-curves of farewell by the generation of hands.

This strikes me as an opportunity for antedating, rather than a genuinely late coinage. And indeed, a few minutes of web search turns up Godfrey H. Thomson, "Interpretation of Threshold Measurements", Psychological Review, 1920, p. 304:

The way that the expression is used in that passage leaves the impression that it was already a commonplace expression in 1920.

The only example of bell curve in Literature Online is from Martin Espada's poem "Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer", 1996:

15 I was a lab coat and rubber gloves
16 hulking between the cages.
17 I sprayed down the batter of monkeyshit
18 coating the bars, fed infant formula in a bottle
19 to creatures with real fingers,
20 tested digital thermometers greased
21 in their asses, and carried boxes of monkeys
22 to the next experiment.
23 We gathered the Fear Data, keeping score
24 as a mechanical head
25 with blinking red bulbs for eyes
26 and a siren for a voice
27 scared monkeys who spun in circles,
28 chattering instructions
29 from their bewildered brains.

30 I did not ask for explanations,
31 even when I saw the sign
32 taped to the refrigerator that read:
33 Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer.
34 I imagined the doctor who ordered the sign,
35 the moment when the freezer door
36 swung open on that other face,
37 and his heart muscle chattered like a monkey.

38 So I understood
39 when a monkey leapt from the cage
40 and bit my thumb through the rubber glove,
41 leaving a dollop of blood that gleamed
42 like icing on a cookie.
43 And I understood when one day, the doctors gone,
44 a monkey outside the bell curve of the Fear Data
45 shrieked in revolt, charging
46 the red-eyed mechanical head
47 as all the lab coats cheered.

It surprised me to see no literary uses in the 1930s through 1970s of such a simple and evocative phrase for such a basic and important concept. But Herrnstein and Murray's 1994 book The Bell Curve guaranteed that this term would enter the linguistic mainstream, in a variety of more-or-less metaphorical interpretations.

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ABC Radio National's Philosopher's Zone has a fantastic programme discussing Michel Foucault's influential book 'Madness and Civilisation' on the 50th anniversary of its publication.

The book is nominally a history of madness since the enlightenment. Foucault argues that the age saw a cultural shift where madness was distinguished from reason and the civilised mind and where the mad were marked out and separated from mainstream society.

He argues that Europe began creating legal and social mechanisms to control those they deemed mad. Not least among these was the invention of the asylum and Foucault cites the 17th century as where lunatics began to be banished to these imposing human warehouses in what he called the 'great confinement'.

Except, it never happened. As the late great medical historian Roy Porter noted in his book A Social History of Madness (ISBN 1857995023), there is no evidence of a systematic confinement of the mad in the 17th century.

The records show that France was the only country in Europe to centralise its administration of services for the 'pauper madman' while other countries didn't typically have any legislation in place until the 19th century.

This detail is glossed over by the programme but, by examining some other of Foucault's claims, it does make a similar point that Madness and Civilisation isn't actually a very good history book.

This has only recently become clear to many as while an abridged version has been available for years in English, the full translation, including the now clearly inadequate references to historical sources, was only published in 2005.

Perhaps the book's lasting legacy is not in the details of the rather shaky arguments but in the way in which Foucault approached the subject: showing that medical and scientific concepts are influenced as much by cultural beliefs and fashions as by empirical data.

By the way, Porter's A Social History of Madness is a little academic in it's style but is otherwise absolutely fantastic. It got glowing reviews from pretty much everyone in psychiatry including arch 'anti-psychiatrist' Thomas Szasz, which is quite an achievement in itself.

Link to Philosopher's Zone on Madness and Civilisation.

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