Being Human

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After graduating from Eastern Mennonite, he earned his Ph.D. from the famed social psychology program at the Ohio State Univeristy. ...

The latest Nature NeuroPod podcast has just been released and covers the use of the hot new genetics technique genome-wide association studies in neuroscience, sections on colour-blindness and stroke, and a recent study on learning in patients in coma-like states.

The discussion of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is interesting in light of some headline studies that have come along recently on schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer's disease. There's also a fantastic article in this week's Nature that discusses the successes and failures of the technique, including in recent studies on the genetics of schizophrenia.

Perhaps the most interesting section is the discussion on how patients in a coma-like 'persistent vegetative state' (PVS) can show conditioned learning where they can associate different sensations. Not all unconscious patient could show learning, but the ones that did showed much better recovery from their severe brain damage.

Link to NeuroPod page.
mp3 of this edition.

Money Can Buy Happiness — If You're Paid By the Hour
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In the "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin," researchers report that present evidence that being paid by the hour leads workers "to rely more on ...

There are a couple of excellent posts on Neurophilosophy covering recent studies that demonstrate the powerful effect of vision on the perception of physical sensations in our body.

The first covers an interesting study that found that looking directly at your hand reduces laser-induced pain compared to a condition where you are only looking at a visual substitute created with a mirror reflection of the other hand (akin to a mirror box set up).

The second post discusses the possibilities of taking advantage of the 'rubber hand illusion' to allow us to feel like we're physically inhabiting virtual bodies.

Numerous experiments have shown that we look at a rubber hand being touched simultaneously and in the same way as our real hand, the sensation seems to be located in the fake.

This new experiment attempted something similar but in virtual reality, demonstrating that a synchronised 'touch' could be perceived as arising from an avatar hand in a 3D computer generated environment.

While the same research team had demonstrated this effect before this new study showed how the effect could transfer, albeit more weakly, to a virtual arm controlled by a brain-computer interface driven solely from EEG readings.

Both of these studies demonstrate how vision is integrated with tactile information from the body to create our sense of body image, ownership and sensation and both get a great write-up from Neurophilosophy.

Link to Neurophilosophy post visual pain reduction.
Link to Neurophilosophy on the 'virtual hand illusion'.

This clip, from the US version of comedy show The Office, shows Jim training co-worker Dwight to expect a sweet everytime he reboots his computer.

From Vodpod.

Psychologists everywhere will recognise this an an application of classical conditioning. The 'scientist' Jim has heard of is, of course, Ivan Pavlov.

Thanks to Russ Fazio for showing us this clip during his keynote at the recent BPS Social Psychology Section conference.

A couple of days ago, in "Fact-checking George F. Will, one more time", I noted that Will complained about the

…  egregious cliches sprinkled around by the tin-eared employees in the White House speechwriting shop. The president told the Olympic committee that: "At this defining moment," a moment "when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations" in "this ever-shrinking world," he aspires to "forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world."

While admitting that "I don't have a program ready to hand for measuring cliche-density, much less cliche egregiosity ", I nevertheless offered the opinion that "in speeches prepared for ceremonial occasions like this one, the cliche density of presidential rhetoric has been fairly constant for decades if not centuries".

I still don't have a metric for cliche-density, but we can learn something by exploring the site http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/ for certain fixed phrases.

For example, there's no question that "defining moment" is a defining phrase for Barack Obama, who has used it ten  times in texts indexed on that site. The only other president who has ever used it (in texts indexed there, anyhow) is, interestingly, George W. Bush, who used it once.

As for that "ever-shrinking world", Obama has used this phrase once before the Olympic pitch, and no other president (or presidential speech-writer) has ever done so.

And no other president has apparently ever aspired in so many words to "forge new partnerships". But George W. Bush ("America and China: Address in Thailand", 8/7/2008) promised to "forge new relationships with countries that share our values". In fact, that phrase came from a sentence notably dense in the high-sounding abstract phrases that George Will seems to dislike so much in Barack Obama's speech:

America has pursued four broad goals in the region: reinvigorate our alliances, forge new relationships with countries that share our values, seize new opportunities for prosperity and growth, and confront shared challenges together.

Interestingly, presidents Bush and Obama are the two only presidents to voice the aspiration to "confront * challenges": Obama three times, and Bush four times. Many other presidents have confronted challenges, but only these two have used those words.

And even more than confronting challenges, George W. Bush was fond of (talking about) confronting problems: the string "confront problems" occurs 36 times in his texts, and — amazingly — not once in the texts of any other American president.

GW Bush was also fond of (talking about) seizing things: "seize new opportunities" (W 2, no others), "seize this|that opportunity" (W 2, Gore 1, no others), "seize opportunities" (W 2, Clinton 2, no others) "seize this moment" (W 3, Kerry 1, no others), "seize the moment" (W 4, no others), "seizing this moment" (W 1, no others), "seize the initiative" (W 1, no others), "seize control" (W 4, Carter 1, no others).

Overall, such phrases often seem to be associated with particular time periods and with particular presidents. Thus James Munroe and Andrew Jackson were each "deeply impressed" three times, and James Polk and Martin van Buren once each. The only other presidents to have been "deeply impressed" were — again — that unlikely pair George W. Bush and Barack Obama, once each.

It would be interesting to run a collocation-detection algorithm over the whole collection of presidential speeches. This might give something approximating a cliche-density metric (though really there should be some normalization relative to usage patterns in the wider world). But the eigenstructure of the president-by-cliche matrix might tell us whether Barack and W are really rhetorical brothers beneath the skin, and reveal other hidden (or at least amusing) affinities.

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My view on the classic prescriptive bugaboo known as dangling modifiers or dangling participles (henceforth, danglers) is, I think, a bit unusual. I don't regard danglers as grammatical mistakes; that is, I think the syntax of English does not block them. Yet I do think they constitute mistakes, in a broader sense, so in a way I am with the prescriptivists on this one. A dangler is an error in a domain that I have compared (for want of a better way to put it) to courtesy or manners. I regard danglers as minor offenses against communicational etiquette, but not against grammar. The argument against danglers being grammar errors is simple: they are too common in even careful published writing, and come too fluently to the keyboards of even excellent writers, and are accepted without remark by too many educated readers. If you ask what evidence there is that, for example, verbs come before objects in English, the answer is that it is overwhelmingly clear from just about all of everybody's usage just about all the time, and from the blank "What's gone wrong with you?" reactions if you try putting the object before the verb. The evidence on danglers goes entirely the other way. Here, for example, is an example in the carefully edited prose of The Economist (October 3rd, 2009, p. 79):

A report to the British House of Commons this year highlighted the case of an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond, who was arrested, at gunpoint, in February 2003 while on holiday in South Africa. After being held for three weeks, it turned out that the American extradition request was based on a fraudster who had stolen Mr Bond's identity.

The only relevant thing the syntax says, I believe, is that subjectless non-finite clauses, and preposition phrases having such clauses as complement of the preposition, and predicative constituents such as adjective phrases, may be used as adjuncts.

And all the semantics says is that the target of predication in such cases is filled in by reference to a grammatically salient noun phrase (NP) in the immediate vicinity. That's it.

Consider in this light the task of interpreting the second sentence in the quotation above. After what? Somebody being held for three weeks. Who was held? We're guessing thus far, so let's wait and see what the subject of the matrix clause is… Hmm, the pronoun it. That's not very promising: what non-human could have been held? Let's go on. It turned out that… This makes it clear that the it was a dummy — a meaningless placeholder in a context where a complement clause is in extraposition (postponed till the end of the clause containing it). Well, what's the subject of the clause in extraposition? The American extradition request. But surely that is not what was held. Let's go on. Was based on a fraudster… Could the target of predication be a fraudster? No, that makes no sense. Any other NPs? Well, there is one more (though we're down to NPs that could hardly be called grammatically salient now): the object of stolen, namely, Mr Bond's identity. But that doesn't make sense either: this isn't about the South Africans holding the man's identity.

Wait a minute, though: if we look inside that NP we see that its determiner is the genitive NP Mr Bond's. Perhaps the thing to do is to ignore the genitive case on that and try Mr Bond as the target of predication. After Mr Bond had been held for three weeks. Yes, that would make sense. We'd better assume that.

You can get there. But what a struggle. Floundering around for what could be as much as an extra second, which in language processing is a very long time, there were four different false leads planted in the text for us to pursue — four NPs that were not the right choice for the target of predication we needed to plug together with the being held clause.

It is true that if we had looked back at the previous sentence instead of plowing on we would have noticed that there was an indefinite NP, an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond, which was a prime candidate. If we had happened to be still holding onto that, and we had tried plugging in a definite version of that ("the aforesaid elderly British citizen called Derek Bond"), it would have worked like a charm. But that NP was embedded in a larger one (the case of an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond), and following it we had read four other NPs (gunpoint; February 2003; holiday; and South Africa. Any syntactic salience that NP might have had was lost before we began the next sentence.

Hearers and readers can't be expected hold onto every NP they run across, keeping all of them live and active in short-term syntactic memory just in case perhaps one of them might be suddenly needed to make a subjectless clause adjunct interpretable. That's not how we work, or so it seems to me. Mostly we expect the sentences we encounter to be parsable independently: take any one of them on its own and you should be able to understand it down to the level where all that remains is assigning antecedents to pronouns and filling in gaps due to ellipsis. And that second sentence does not meet the condition. We had to fumble around and look all over the place to find a target of predication for the subjectless clause in the initial PP.

That's a shortcoming on the part of the writer. Not a disastrous blunder or a major display of ignorance; just a minor discourtesy to the reader. That's what I think danglers are.

But they are extraordinarily common, and they occur now and then even in what is in general terms excellent writing. The more sensitive to syntax you are, the more you will be struck by them and incommoded by them. The more you exercise your common sense rather than your syntactic sense when figuring out what a subjectless non-finite clause adjunct must mean, the less you will notice them. But they will be out there, in everything you read (somewhat less frequently in conversation because of its lower syntactic complexity — we don't use non-finite clause adjuncts so much when chatting about who's going to pick up the milk).

Just for fun (but not out of a lack of courtesy) I embedded a deliberate dangler in the paragraphs above. Now you will know how careful a reader you are. If you didn't notice it, that underlines my point that you probably do not operate by a set of syntactical rules that forbid danglers. And if you did notice it, and experienced that odd extra second of squirming around looking for a target of predication, then you'll know what I've been talking about.

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COMMUNITY "Social Psychology" Episode 4
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Take a first look at the new NBC series COMMUNITY "Social Psychology" Episode 4 Thursday October 8 (9:30-10 pm ET). Episode Synopsis: COMMUNITY "Social ...

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So that's what they mean by "War of Northern Aggression."
Canada.com
This is actual research, from an actual scientific source, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It was done in 1996, but you can still find it ...

In my recent post "The United States as a subject", I discussed the often-repeated story that the American Civil War turned "the United States are" into "the United States is", and observed that "no one seems ever to have checked, at least not very thoroughly". It's a good thing that I said "seems", since Minor Myers has gently pointed me to his article "Supreme Court Usage and the Making of an 'Is'", 11 Green Bag 2d 457, August 2008, in which he checks this very point, very carefully, in opinions of the United States Supreme Court from 1790 to 1919.

And the answer? In the case of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, we apparently became an 'is' somewhat gradually, between 1840 and 1910. And the effect of the Civil War (or at least its immediate aftermath) was apparently to retard the change, not to accelerate it.

After citing the Shelby Foote "It made us an 'is'" quote that I also gave, Myers adds some evidence of the ubiquity of this view. Thus he quotes James McPherson, Battle cry of freedom: The Civil War era, 1988:

Before 1861 the two words ‘United States’ were rendered as a plural noun: ‘the United States are a republic.’ The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun.

And also William Michael Treanor, "Taking Text Too Serously: Modern Textualism, Original meaning, and the Case of Amar's Bill of Rights", Michigan Law Review, vol. 106, 487-544 (Dec. 2007):

‘United States’ was often matched with a plural verb in 1787 and consistently matched with a singular verb after the Civil War.

In order to evaluate these claims in the case of Supreme Court opinions, Myers used the following method:

For each decade in the survey period, I ran word searches for “United States is” and “United States are” through the Westlaw Supreme Court database. To eliminate false positives, I reviewed the search results to identify opinions where (1) “United States” was a subject and (2) the associated verb was “is” (or “are,” depending on the search). To isolate only usage choices made by the author, anything appearing only in a quotation from a statute, a court rule, or another case was ignored, as was anything in West headnotes. Each opinion in a particular case was treated as a separate work, and thus a case could have more than one entry if more than one justice wrote or if a justice used both “is” and “are” in the same opinion. I collected data on usage in the opinions of justices, the arguments of counsel before the court, and supplementary material prepared by the reporter of decisions (e.g., a syllabus). Except where noted, the focus of the presentation here is on usage in opinions of the justices; data on usage in other portions of the case reports appear in the Appendix.

Here are his basic results in graphical form (click for a larger version):

His conclusion:

The Civil War does not appear to have altered the Supreme Court’s usage in a fashion as dramatic as Foote and McPherson have suggested. In the 1860s, the usage pattern shifts away from “are” and toward “is,” and it is during that decade that usage of “is” first predominates. But the change is not wholesale – “are” and “is” were used roughly equally in the 1860s. In the following decade, Court usage reverted back to antebellum patterns. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, plural usage predominated in Supreme Court opinions, though by slowly declining margins.

Usage was quite clearly unsettled in the latter part of the nineteenth century. One of the most striking demonstrations of this is Justice Samuel F. Miller’s majority opinion in United States v. Lee. Justice Miller managed to compose a sentence with both usages:

“[T]he doctrine [of sovereign immunity], if not absolutely limited to cases in which the United States are made defendants by name, is not permitted to interfere with the judicial enforcement of the established rights of plaintiffs when the United States is not a defendant or a necessary party to the suit.”

He observes that some of the obvious theories about sources of variation don't pan out, at least in this data set:

Geography does not help explain this pattern. Looking at the geographic latitudes of the justices’ residences prior to appointment, there is no meaningful difference between the mean latitude for the exclusive “are” users and the mean for those who dabbled in “is.”

Politics doesn't seem to help either, at least in the obvious way:

To see whether the Civil War might have influenced usage in a different way, I isolated the usage by justices who were appointed by President Abraham Lincoln. In fact, during the period when at least one justice appointed by Lincoln was on the Court, the five Lincoln-appointed justices used “are” slightly more frequently than did the other justices.

Here's his appendix, giving the counts in different sorts of SCOTUS material:

It would be interesting to look at some other features as well — number agreement with verbs other than is/are; (which would help to increase the rather small counts from this source); the distribution of pronouns co-referential with the United States (19th-century newspapers give us examples of they, it, she, and we); what fraction of "United States" instances are subjects as opposed to modifiers or PP complements or whatever; how usage is affected by the topic, e.g. relations of the federal government to foreign governments, to the states separately, to individual citizens or companies, etc.

West's materials are definitely not accessible for automatic processing of such questions; but most if not all of the same documents are available on the web, I think, so this might be a good testing ground for the idea of automatic or semi-automatic analysis of this type.

There's a curious case published in the medical journal Epilepsy and Behavior of a young man who had his epilepsy triggered by the sight of stairs. This would cause seizures that would trigger "repetitive hugging and affectionate kissing of one of the people around him".

Our patient is currently 24 years old. He is a right-handed male with a history of right temporal lobe epilepsy. He had his first seizure when he was 10 years old. His seizures usually started with an aura of a “feeling” inside his body or abdomen. This feeling, described at times as pain or nausea, lasted a few seconds or a few minutes. His eyes would then widen, he would become confused, and he would look around right and left as if wondering. The seizure would last 1 to 2 minutes with altered consciousness, spitting, and often repetitive hugging and affectionate kissing of one of the people around him.

At times this was followed by head and eye deviation to the left and, sometimes, rotation of the whole body to the left side. Occasionally, he would walk around for a few seconds. These seizures were often precipitated by looking at stairs, whether or not he was walking up the stairs. He learned to avoid looking at stairs to avoid having seizures. He also noted that looking down a flight of stairs did not precipitate his seizures.

I am constantly amazed by both how seizures can be triggered by very specific experiences (such as seeing a certain thing, or hearing a specific sound) and how they can lead to very selective actions.

This is by no means a typical effect of epilepsy but it does raise the interesting question of how these very narrow experiences lead to destabilising brain states which trigger a seizure.

I have heard anecdotal reports from several clinicians that they've met patients who can 'think their way out' of a seizure by deliberately focusing their thoughts on a specific topic, presumably which reduces the destabilising effect of their original 'trigger experience'.

I've not seen this discussed in the medical literature though, so if you know of any articles that do tackle it, I'd love to hear about them.

Link to PubMed entry for stair triggered epilepsy case.

From a NYT story (Shaila Dewan, "Pollster's Censure Jolts News Organizations", October 3) on the polling company Strategic Vision, which has been reprimanded by a professional society of pollsters for failing to disclose "essential facts" about its methods:

As for the accusation that the company's claim to be based in Atlanta was misleading, Mr. Johnson [David E. Johnson, the founder and chief executive of Strategic Vision] acknowledged that the main Strategic Vision office was in Blairsville, Ga., 115 miles away, but said the difference was "semantic".

Yeah, yeah, blame it on the words. "Semantic" here means 'only semantic, not substantive' and locates the problem not in differences of matters of fact but in differences in the meanings of linguistic expressions. The claim is that some people use certain expressions (like based in Atlanta) one way, while other people use these expressions somewhat differently, so that any dispute about the state of things is "just / merely / only" a dispute about word meanings.

Now, there's plenty of variation in the meanings people assign to words (and other expressions), and lexicographers, dialectologists, sociolinguists, and theoretical linguists examine this variation all the time. The question is whether SV's use of based in Atlanta is an instance of this sort of variation. As a rule of thumb, you should be suspicious whenever someone who's not professionally involved in the study of semantic variation dismisses some difference as "(just) semantic(s)" or the like; it's likely to be a dodge, or at least a stretching of the truth.

In the case at hand, what's at issue is what counts as being in some location. There's a certain amount of allowable leeway in such things, according to which you can get by saying that your company is located in X when in fact it's in a suburb of X or in a separate jurisdiction within the boundaries of X. So if your company is located in West Hollywood, Santa Monica, or Burbank, it wouldn't be entirely misleading to say (in some contexts) that it's in Los Angeles (though "in the Los Angeles area", or something similar, would be a more scrupulous phrasing).

But even when places are in the same metropolitan area and are close to one another, sometimes few people would accept as "located/based in [principal city of the whole area]" as an identification for a company. A company based in Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, or Mountain View (not to mention San Jose or Santa Cruz) can't get away with saying it's "based in San Francisco". "Based in the Bay Area", yes, but not "based in San Francisco". Sometimes, close doesn't count.

Washington DC and Baltimore MD are different locations, even though they're only 34 miles apart; similarly, Boston MA and Providence RI, only 41 miles apart. And then on to New York NY and New Haven CT, 67 miles apart; Chicago IL and Milwaukee WI, 83 miles apart; New York NY and Philadelphia PA, 86 miles apart; Cleveland OH and Erie PA, 92 miles apart. (All under the 115-mile mark.)

You don't have to cross state lines: Philadelphia and Harrisburg PA are 90 miles apart; Columbus and Cincinnati OH, 100 miles apart; Los Angeles and San Diego CA, 111 miles apart. Just a tad over the 115-mile mark are Columbus and Cleveland OH, 124 miles apart. (These lists are not intended to be exhaustive, merely representative; the distances are from the Geobytes City Distance Tool.)

The point is that it can be seriously misleading to say that your company is based at location X when in fact it's based at location Y, even if Y is not far from X or is in Y's cultural orbit.

Note: "in its cultural orbit". I imagine that David Johnson would like to claim that he can say that his company is based in Atlanta because Atlanta is the largest city near the tiny town of Blairsville (though Knoxville TN is 122 miles from Blairsville). But thinking this way would allow all sorts of mischievous misrepresentation. For instance, a company with its headquarters in Auburn AL could represent itself as "based in Atlanta" (a mere 106 miles away from Auburn).

It might have been useful for Johnson to refer to Atlanta in some way in locating his company. (Who knows about Blairsville, after all?) Or he could have said that the company is located in Union County, at the very northern edge of Georgia. But saying that the company is located in Atlanta just won't do, and trying to deflect criticism of this claim by saying it's all a matter of semantics won't do either.

[Addendum 10/8: Peter Taylor writes: "One of the criticisms levelled at Strategic Vision, LLC is that there is a well-known (and, it is alleged, better-known) polling company called Strategic Vision, Inc. based in San Diego. At the moment your LL post refers simply to "Strategic Vision". You may wish to clarify."]

Local MC student looks for answers with autism study
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Haught had little background on autism when she learned a bit about it in a developmental psychology course at the college. She took that interest to ...

I was trying to keep up with the news on Iran's "secret new nuclear enrichment facility" a couple of weeks ago, as I'm sure many of our readers were also doing. In reading one update in the NYT, I came upon this quotation:

[Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's nuclear program, said in an interview with ISNA news agency on Sunday, said] that Iran had taken defensive measures against possible military threats against the facility into consideration. "We are always faced with threats," he said. "We don't think that those threats would necessarily take place but we have prepared ourselves for the worse."

Shouldn't that be "for the worst"?, I found myself asking as I read this. But then I remembered the fact that [t] and [d] are highly likely to be deleted (= unpronounced) in this kind of position (word- and utterance-finally and after another consonant) in many if not most (most if not all?) spoken varieties of English, even when the distinction between e.g. worse and worst is at stake — a somewhat subtle distinction in most contexts anyway, including this one. This deletion has also been found to be even more likely among (some groups of) second language speakers, which we can reasonably assume the translator (and/or the transcriber) to be. [ I've not been able to find the original quote, but given that the ISNA is primarily a Persian-language news agency (with an available English-language version), I assume that this English quotation was not original to Salehi but rather that it is a translation of the Persian original. ]

Quick Google searches for {"prepare for the worst"} and {"prepare for the worse"} reveal both that the variant with worst is almost 10 times more common than the variant with worse (~25M ghits vs. ~2.6M ghits) and what appears to me to be a subtle but not insignificant class distinction of sorts: the worst variant seems to be found in more formal, "corporate" sites (book publishers, magazines, and the like), while the worse variant seems to be found in more informal sites (message boards, blogs, and the like). Overall, though, not too shabby a showing for the worse variant.

New Scientist has a fantastic issue on 'strange journeys of the mind' that has three great articles on the twilight zone of sleep, simulating psychopathology with hypnosis and laboratory-induced out-of-body experiences.

The piece on the hypnotic simulation of brain disturbances is fantastic, not least because it features two researchers I work with, Peter Halligan and David Oakley, who have done some of the seminal work in the area.

Essentially, the approach views hypnosis as a tool that allows researchers, with the co-operation of the participant, to temporarily alter mental states in a completely safe and reversible way.

Importantly, these alterations, such as blindness or paralysis, seem like they're happening 'on their own' - which helps us understand conditions like conversion disorder, where these sorts of symptoms appear without any neurological damage but without the patient seeming to have any control over them.

The other article which blew me away was on recent studies suggesting that sleep and alertness are not two distinct states of consciousness and in some people with a dementia-like brain disorder the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down.

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. "There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive," he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either.

Finally, the piece on out of body experiences covers the work of Swiss researchers who have been studying these states in people with brain disorder, and managing to induce them in volunteers in a number of inventive ways.

Three awesome articles, all worth your time, all open-access. Three cheers New Scientist.

Link to article on sleep states.
Link to article on hypnotic simulations.
Link to article on out-of-body experiences.

Facebook Tries to Monitor Happiness
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Electrical readings from seven patients who died in hospital suggest that the brain undergoes a surge of activity at the moment of death, according to a study just published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

Palliative care is a medical approach that aims to make dying patients as comfortable as possible. As part of this, doctors from George Washington University Medical Centre's intensive care unit were using standard alertness monitors for seven patients that include EEG measurements of the frontal lobes.

The monitors are commercial devices designed to help anaesthetists monitor how 'awake' patients are, and they combine the electrical readings from the brain into a single signal that reflects alertness.

For each of the seven patients, the researchers noticed that at the point where blood pressure dropped to zero there was a surge in brain activity. The graph on the right is from one of the patients and shows a typical activity burst.

This is not the first time these have been noticed, but previous reports were single cases and the electrical surges were explained away as due to electrical interference from other sources. In these new cases, the doctors could be pretty confident that previously suggested sources of interference weren't present.

Instead, they suggest that the surge was due to 'anoxic depolarisation' - a process where the lack of oxygen destabilises the electrical balance of the neurons leading to one last cascade of activity.

Now, this is just a case series and the neuroelectrical measures aren't the best. The researchers encourage more systematic research with appropriate tools, but they do suggest an intriguing hypothesis with regard to 'near death experiences':

We speculate that in those patients who suffer cardiac arrest who are successfully revived, they may recall the images and memories triggered by this cascade. We offer this as a potential explanation for the clarity in which many patients have "out of body experiences" when successfully revived from a near death event.

One of the difficulties, of course, is that although 'near death experiences' are a well-known phenomenon, we only know about them from people who weren't really dying (or even from people who were never actually 'near death' as one of my favourite studies attests).

Nevertheless, neuroscience studies on the dying are likely to be of increasing interest especially as the debate about what counts as death become more prominent.

Link to DOI entry and summary of study.