Neural Interface

Raising An Issue in Indian Psychology

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:30:00 +0000

A recent literature search threw up an interesting-looking paper; a randomised controlled trial (RCT) on the effect of yoga on gunas (personality) in healthy volunteers (free to read). I was surprised as I rarely come across academic papers on yoga, that too with explicit reference to 'gunas' in the title. . I couldn’t help noticing at the outset that the study appeared to have been carried out at the Department of Yoga Research, Swami Vivekananda Anusandhana Samsthana, a deemed-to-be yoga university. The study was also published in the International Journal of Yoga, which appears to be the university’s own journal publication. So there is plenty of scope for bias to creep in.

Despite that RCTs are the 'gold standard' of psychological research when done properly, the stated aims of this paper didn't exactly fill me with confidence. The study itself wasn't what interested me, but rather one of the tools that the researchers used to assess the participants' personalities. In psychology, personality is assessed using specific scales or questionnaires that have been designed to measure a particular construct, say, anxiety or depression. The Beck Depression Inventory is probably the best known and widely used example of a scale to measure depression, and you can find information about other scales at Wikipedia.

An important concept in the construction of such scales is known as construct validity, the ability of the scale to measure what it is supposed to measure. Using the BDI as an example, can it be that a set of questions is capable of measuring the presence and intensity of depression in a person? All other things being equal, the answer is that it is probably the most reliable tool we have for measuring depression at the moment and that it has been consistently used in a number of different medical fields. Much research has been done in the field of personality psychology in an attempt to construct a real-term workable scale with which to assess personality. Many scales exist, but generally speaking researchers have come to agree that personality can be defined in terms of the "Big 5" factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Psychopathy, and that all of our personalities can be measured in different ratings of these. The Reliability of such scales is another important issue that also means something different to the popular sense of the word, and we'll get to that at some point.

For this study the research team wanted to analyse the effects of a yoga course on personality and self-esteem, and they measured these with Karunanidhi's Self-Esteem Inventory (1996) and, wait for it, the Gita Inventory of Personality (Das, 1991). According to this paper, the GIP (referred to as GIN within the paper) was to measure three dimensions of personality: Sattva, Rajas and Tamas.

There is reason to suspect that, at least in the case of the GIP, something mischievous is afoot in the name of psychology. The Gita referred to is of course the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu scripture (traditionally believed to be 5000 years old), and the three personality dimensions being assessed are described in the 14th chapter of the text. I'm aware of issues of sensitivity surrounding cross-cultural research in psychology, the importance of accepting cultural boundaries, and so on. If you were to rely on Wikipedia, cross-cultural psychiatry (or transcultural psychiatry) is that which is "concerned with the cultural and ethnic context of mental disorders and psychiatric services".

I have to wonder, though, are cases like this something that ought to be a concern or to be praised? On one hand we have here a different outlook on personality that is independent of Western-oriented psychology, but on the other we have to wonder about the appropriateness of assessing people's individual personality traits on the basis of definitions provided in an antiquated religious text. Psychological research is frequently slighted or condemned (depending on who you listen to) as being overly WEIRD - analysing and assessing people that are dominantly Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic, and that is a fair criticism in context. In general, the field is crying out for fresh perspectives.

However, it remains unclear if ethnically contextual research from the other end of the spectrum will be able to provide new insight into the field of personality psychology if little to no effort is made to work collegially, and using similar standards of measurement with which to assess people and carry out much needed research.

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Deshpande S., Nagendra H.R. & Nagarathna R. (2009). A randomized control trial of the effect of yoga on Gunas (personality) and Self esteem in normal healthy volunteers., International Journal of Yoga, 2 (1) 13-21. PMID: 21234210

Before We Hear Of 'Neuropuncture' In The Commons

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:15:00 +0000

Late last month, it was announced that David Tredinnick MP had been appointed to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. The Times rightly described the collective gasp of despair and arms exasperatedly thrown in the air by British scientists in response to this news.

For Tredinnick is known to believe in and advocate for a variety of peculiar beliefs relating to superstition and alternative medicine. Namely, that biological mechanisms behind blood clotting - as well as pregnancy and hangovers - were dependent on the phase of the moon. He is also an avid believer in homeopathy and acupuncture, suggesting that they should be provided by the NHS in spite of extremely little evidence of medical efficacy.

In a recent Q&A he was provided the opportunity to clarify his position on these and other issues, but instead used the occasion to confirm his views defiantly. This part caught my eye; in response to what Tredinnick thinks the STC should look at:

"Looking at healthcare, one of the mysteries of Western medicine is acupuncture. And there’s a lot of criticism of it saying it doesn’t work. But I’ve used Chinese medicine for years, and I cannot work out why this isn’t more widely used in the health service. The same for herbal medicine, we need to get back to some natural remedies that have stood the tests of time."

Although he didn't specificy what for, presumably Tredinnick suggests that acupuncture may have some application for psychotherapeutic strategies and neurological conditions too? In which case, I need only point to James Coyne's two-part sparkling rebuttal to claims that acupuncture may have any special efficacy for mental health conditions such as depression. And as for the neuroscience (the more research-minded can enjoy this 2007 review), I recently acquired an online copy of Val Hopwood & Clare Donnellan's Acupuncture in Neurological Conditions (2010), and it's a very interesting read. Especially this amazingly revealing little tidbit listed as a 'key point' of Chapter 1:

"The concept of ‘neurology’ is a relatively modern one, with no real place in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). This is only partly because there is no historical concept of the ‘brain’ in TCM physiology. There have been many schools of Chinese medicine: some included ideas that we would recognize as ‘neurology’, whereas others did not."

Y'know, when something this damning is admitted in the first chapter, it may be time to give up and put the book down and realise that you're not going to get very far with this. And if the House of Commons actually plan to consider these things, it can only be a colossal waste of time, energy and resources. What to speak of the possibility of garnering dubious expenses.

Terminator Vision: I Can Haz It?

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:38:00 +0000

You've all seen The Terminator film and it's sequels and, admit it, you loved them. Not just because of the creepy futurealistic storyline but because of the stunts, the camerawork, the casting, and the sheer action of it all. And, of course, the special effects. As an example of the best sci-fi films out there, the Terminator films franchise has grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide. Some of the iconic scenes in the movies related directly to the Terminator itself, that ice-cold stare as a mistaken victim was brutally gunned down in pursuit of the target. But what was it about that scary stare? Surely it was the gleaming infrared light in the robotic eyeball that was shielded most of the time by the humanlike exterior. That infrared light enabled the Terminator itself to view its own surroundings:

Composite image. Credits: odysseyart.net and Orion Pictures

In the emerging field of neuroprosthetics, the most well-known examples of the technology are cochlear implants for the deaf and retinal implants for the blind. Generally speaking, they work by receiving auditory and visual signals and then transmit them to the relevant brain areas after being transformed into electrical impulses. Obviously, these tools are extremely useful in restoring hearing/vision functions to those who weren't born with them or who have lost them due to injury. In some cases, depending on the nature and extent of the absence/injury, it may be necessary to augment rather than restore the functions fully.

Now a new study by researchers at Duke University suggests that 'Terminator Vision' could one day be a reality for some, after successful experiments on rats found increased learning and perception skills when prosthetics were fitted into their brains. Eric Thomsen, Rafael Carra and Miguel Nicolelis trained a cohort of six rats on a simple visual discrimination task: Rats were placed in a circular chamber that had three reward ports. On each trial, a visible LED was activated in a particular port and rats who poked their noses in the correct port were rewarded with a drink of water. After three weeks of training, the rats managed to be 70% correct on average. They were then fitted with an infrared detector as well as implants into the whisker region of the S1 cortex, a touch-sensitive area of the parietal lobe which is largely responsible for spatial navigation.

Bearing in mind that rats are normally blind to infrared light (as are we), it would be worth putting them back into the chamber to see if they could perform the task as well as before. As for how it works: The IR detector transmits electrical impulses directly into the rats' S1 cortex if the rat moved towards the infrared light, which were increased as the rats moved closer or oriented their heads in the light's direction. And here's where it gets interesting: Not only did the rats perform better on the task as before by finding the infrared lights with greater accuracy, but other interesting behaviour was noticed too. Namely, "they learned to actively forage through the behaviour chamber, sweeping the IR sensor on their heads back and forth to sample their IR world".

Read that again: They learned to incorporate their new IR vision relatively quickly into their normal sensory range as a type of "IR vision". And they did this by taking the time to re-orient themselves and make sense of their surroundings. They didn't immediately associate the new stimulation with the task but just assumed it was "something new" for them, scratching their faces in response to the electrical microstimulation. Isn't that awesome?!

It is possible that criticism of this study may cite 'training effects', that the rats had an idea of what to do in the experimental condition because of their previous training with the LED light. But this can be rebutted by how the rats learned to navigate their way with normally invisible infrared light purely by their movement and guidance, what to speak of more additional difficulty layers being added to the original task which were relatively aced by the rats (above 93%) in the IR condition.

In conclusion, the researchers felt that the rats learned to treat microstimulation as an external stimulus originating in the surrounding environment rather than within their body, which is an interesting finding that reflects the understanding of vision in humans too. Even though we have innate eyeballs that look 'out', vision occurs by light entering 'into' the eye. So even though the rats' brains were being stimulated in (correct) response to invisible infrared light, they appeared to act as if the light was shining at them in order to attract them. It was beyond the scope of this study, however, to determine if the rats thought of microstimulation as a separate sense, although the researchers suggest that a potential application of this technology could be in developing motor neuroprostheses - artificial(?) limbs that would be improved in terms of reaction times and accuracy because of the closed-loop bidirectional interaction that the technology can offer.

And of course, a plethora of possibilities that offer the curious possibility of sensory augmentation, the potential to expand sensory range to see forms of light that are normally invisible to human eyes. So it is entirely possible for Terminator Vision to emerge one day.

UPDATE Feb 13th: Coverage of this paper at Scientific American has fallen into the trap of describing the augmented vision as a "sixth sense", oddly proclaiming it as a seventh sense too. Minor but amusing errors.

UPDATE Feb 14th: Wow, now BBC coverage has also fallen into the "sixth sense" trap. Makes you wonder as to who has actually read the paper.

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Thomson E.E., Carra R. & Nicolelis M.A.L. (2013). Perceiving invisible light through a somatosensory cortical prosthesis, Nature Communications, 4 1482. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2497

Primitive Physick - John Wesley

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:21:00 +0000

Christian theologian and cleric, John Wesley (1703-1791), who is credited with founding the Methodist denomination of Christianity, and due to whose teachings the Methodists were leading activists in the social issues of their day such as prison reform and abolitionism, is not necessarily someone we would expect to write a book detailing treatments for all sorts of medical ailments. But this is what he did in a relatively little-known work of his entitled Primitive Physick; Or An Easy And Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases.

It is notable, however, that during his lifetime Wesley was considered a quack, both spiritually and medically (Madden, 2007). He led an itinerant lifestyle in order to preach as he never had his own church, and it is thought that the prevalence of disease as well as the prevalence and tendency of quacks who combined their treatments with theology were among the reasons behind writing this book.

According to Wesley, the word 'primitive' was akin to 'original' or 'early', and 'physic' was a general term for health care, especially “how to live in accordance with nature by proper diet and exercise, both to restore health and to retain it,” (Maddox, 2007). Taken together, Primitive Physick was a book that would be classed as holistic or alternative medicine today.

In Ingram's Patterns Of Madness In The Eighteenth Century: A Reader, it is noted that Wesley saw disease as a consequence of the Fall and thus regarded mankind as primarily responsible for its own sufferings. Wesley says as much in his preface:

"When man came first out of the hands of the Great Creator, clothed in body, as well as in soul, with immortality and incorruption, there was no place for physic, or the art of healing. As he knew no sin, he knew no pain, no sickness, weakness, or bodily disorder ... But since man rebelled against the Sovereign of heaven and earth, how entirely is the scene changed! ... The seeds of wickedness and pain, of sickness and death, are now lodged in our inmost substance; whence a thousand disorders continually spring, even without the aid of external violence."

Wesley covered the common illnesses of his day in alphabetical order; mental illnesses, curiously, are not distinguished from physical ailments, as in Wesley's view both are derived from man's first disobedience. They are thus stigmatised no more than other illnesses.

What follows are Wesley's interesting and amusing remedies for various types of psychological conditions, especially the mania associated with rabies:

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44. An Hysteric Cholic.

164. Mrs. Watts, by using the cold bath two and twenty times in a month, was entirely cured of an hysteric cholic, fits, and convulsive motions, continual sweatings and vomiting, wandering pains in her limbs and head, with total loss of appetite.

165. In the fit, half a pint of water with a little wheat-flour in it, and a spoonful of vinegar.

166. Or of warm lemonade: tried.

167. Or, take 20, 30, or 40 drops of balsam of peru on fine sugar: if need be, take this twice or thrice a day:

168. Or, in extremity, boil three ounces of Burdock-seed in water, which give as a clyster:
169. Or, twenty drops of laudanum, in any proper clyster, which gives instant ease.

45. A Nervous Cholic.

170. Use the cold-bath daily for three or four weeks.

171. Or, take quicksilver and acqua sulphurata daily for a month.

136. Hypochondriac and Hysteric Disorders.

426. Use cold bathing:

427. Or, take an ounce of quicksilver every morning, and ten drops of Elixir of Vitriol in the afternoon, in a glass of cold water.

151. Lunacy.

468. Give a decoction of agrimony four times a day:
469. Or, rub the head several times a day with vinegar, in which ground-ivy leaves have been infused:
470. Or, daily take an ounce of distilled vinegar:
471. Or, boil juice of ground-ivy with sweet oil and white wine into an ointment. Shave the head, anoint it therewith, and chafe it every other day for three weeks. Bruise also the leaves and bind them on the head, and give three spoonfuls of the juice warm every morning.
472. Or, be elecrified: tried.

152. Raging Madness.

473. Apply to the head, cloths dipt in cold water:
474. Or, set the patient with his head under a great water-fall, as long as his strength will bear: or, pour water on his head out of a tea-kettle:
475. Or, let him eat nothing but apples for a month:
476. Or, nothing but bread and milk: tried.

153. Bite of a Mad Dog.

477. Plunge into cold water daily for twenty days, and keep as long under as possible. This has cured, even after the hydrophobia was begun.
478. Or, mix ashes of trefoil with hog's-lard, and anoint the part as soon as possible. Repeat it twice or thrice at six hours distance. This has cured many: and particularly a dog bit on the nose by a mad dog.
479. Or, mix a pound of salt, with a quart of water. Squeeze, bathe, and wash the wound with this for an hour. Then bind some salt upon it for twelve hours.
N.B. The Author of this receipt was bit six times by mad dogs, and always cured himself by this means.
480. Or, mix powdered liver-wort, four drachms: black pepper, two drachms. Divide this into four parts, and take one in warm milk for four mornings, fasting. Dr. Mead affirms he never knew this to fail: but it has sometimes failed.
481. Or, take two or three spoonfuls of ribwort, morning and evening, as soon as possible after the bite. Repeat this for two or three changes of the moon. It has not been known to fail.
482. Immediately consult an honest physician.

References:

Ingram, Allan. Patterns of Madness In The Eighteenth Century: A Reader. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.

Madden, Deborah. 'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine': Religion, Medicine and Culture in John Wesley's Primitive Physic (Amsterdam/New York: Rodolpi, 2007).

Maddox, Randy. “John Wesley on Holistic Health and Healing” in Methodist History, 46:1 (October 2007), 4-33.

Lead Astray

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:15:00 +0000

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A recent and interesting article at the investigative MotherJones magazine discusses links between crime rates and the prevalence of lead emissions, touting the latter as America's Real Criminal Element. A follow-up also noted interesting connections involving lead paint.

Kevin Drum does a good job of convincing readers that, rather than political measures being responsible for falling crime rates, the gradual decline of crack use or increased incarcerations, the rather counterintuitive proposal that said rates have dropped due to the gradual withdrawal of leaded petrol. According to Drum, there is a

"growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities."

And among the more important neurologically relevant observations, Drum made special note of a PLOS study; Cecil et. al (2008) found that lead exposure had in fact contributed to reduced/decreased myelination. Myelination refers to the process by which neurons are surrounded by a layer or sheath of myelin, a type of fat that both insulates the neuron and allows for faster transmission and complex communications, and accounts for the composition of the brain's "white matter". Lead exposure was to be a factor in causing a degrading alteration in myelin organisation. In other words, less myelination leads to less co-ordination and slower connections as the neurons will not be communicating effectively.

The same study used MRI-scanning to determine the effect of lead poisoning on the whole brain. Neuronal loss was found in various areas such as the cognitive and emotional areas of the anterior cingulate cortex, regions associated with "general intellectual and executive functioning, antisocial behaviors, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)". Poor scores were found in physical movement tests too, but by far the largest and most serious finding related to a permanent reduction in grey matter, specifically in the medial part of the pre-frontal cortex. According to one of the researchers, Kim Cecil, lead poisoning affected precisely the brain areas "that make us most human", as the pre-frontal cortex is associated with the brain's executive functions; emotion regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning and mental flexibility.

These findings certainly deserve attention although, as Deborah Blum (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and science writer) noted in her response, the research has been covered before, both by Drum (Jan 2012) and other authors/publications, including the Washington Post back in 2007. What makes this article different is Drum's seeming enthusiasm to attribute up to 90% of crime to lead exposure and poisoning. As Blum notes,

"does it trump drugs, poverty, urban gang warfare, education, and other such issues to the point that they account for a bare ten percent of the crime statistics? That's a harder case to make, partly because as Drum himself notes correlation is not causation: the fact, for instance, that falling crime follows a pattern of falling lead exposure doesn't rule out many other influences."

Blum also brings a calming elucidation to the worrying neuroscientific findings as well, stating that, while it is true that lead exposure may lead to significant neurological deficits, it is much more complicated than as simply thought. For instance, reduced myelination can also be down to malnutrition and other environmental factors, and also that research into the situation hasn't yet produced any indication of a clear biological pathway through which exposure to lead can influence individuals to become antisocial and criminal.

As well as indicating other sources of lead that could cause concern, there is agreement that increasing evidence does point to lead as being a significant threat to health and that further research could increase the knowledge and evidence base through which solutions can be found.

If you have time, go take a look at Drum's article. Aside from the '90%' issue (that has since been corrected) it is littered with links to research, making it an edifying and extremely interesting read.

LSD Visit To "Inner Space"

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 14 May 2011 09:46:00 +0000

LSD - The Consciousness-Expanding Drug is the title of a classic anthology compiled by David Solomon in the mid-Sixties, that contained informative articles on the subject of LSD use by a cross-section of intellectuals and pop-culture figures of the day, including Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and William S. Burroughs. It became a best-seller; partly because it was itself a reactionary text written at a time when mainstream LSD use was coming under fire from the police, government, and the media, and partly because of the number of articles written by doctors and other experts that reported the amazing therapeutic effects of LSD use in psychotherapy as well as the treatment and care of alcoholism and other mental disorders. The Hippie revolution was in full swing, and people looked to comprehensive and authoritative-sounding work in order to justify their use of the drug as well as engage with others in debate and discussion.

Solomon, in his preface, speak of his own LSD usage as well as experiments with mescaline and psylocybin:

"My first psychedelic experience was triggered by 400 milligrams of mescaline sulfate. It did indeed induce a flight, but instead of fleeing from reality, I flew more deeply into it. I had never before seen, touched, tasted, heard, smelled and felt so profound a personal unity and involvement with the concrete material world. My psychedelically accelerated mind did not merely grasp the symbolic poetic import, the utter simplicity and truth of William Blake's ecstatic vision: for the first time in my life I literally saw "the world in a grain of sand." My exponentially heightened awareness saw through the static, one-dimensional, ego-constricted, false front which is the consciousness-contracted reality of the everyday world. This was no evasive flight from, but a deep probe into reality."

One article by Houston Smith in the book discusses the religious import of LSD usage, and asks whether Prof. R. C. Zaehner's criticism of LSD-induced religious hallucinations as being of an inferior quality to the apparently genuine nature of 'authentic' religious visionary experience, is justified. I like the way he rebuts the question by, after briefly describing mystical drug usage in other religions, suggesting that to consider the phenomenology of the experience was more important than the ontology, fully aware of the limits of scientific research at the time and leaving it as an open question to be answered by future research.

The text also contains a rather long and experiential account of LSD intoxication by Alan Harrington, entitled 'A Visit to the Inner Space', after he embarked on a marathon trip with two friends:

"A twelve-hour session under the influence of the mind-dilating compound LSD-25 dispatched me on a trip through the cosmos inside my head. LSD enables everyone to become an astronaut of himself. During this flight beyond time into the depths of consciousness, to what must be the memory source of humanity, each of us can explore an inward universe filled with both violent and peaceful revelations ... Seventy-two hours after the night voyage, the emotional effect begins to fade. But details of the experience remain clear. Things seen by one's dilated eyes and the mind's eye will not be forgotten. Some of the more intellectual insights remain, too. I am speaking here of only one session—the initial, shocking one. You may be able to take off on other, much more easy, inward journeys. Unlike the first trip, these can be "programmed" to orbit you around a given life problem.

"A single LSD session will not be likely to produce a great and lasting change in one's life. But it shows the way to change. My first experience opened up paths of thinking that I never knew existed. I know that the vision revealed by psycho-chemicals can help overcome feelings of alienation and loneliness; it can make death appear somewhat less fearful. The common vision of immortality, revealed in one way or another to most people under LSD, indicates the possibility of my survival in some form, my ever-returning to life ... It began with a salty taste in my mouth, and my vision started to become prismatic. (One's pupils actually dilate and appear to be the size of quarters.) There was a pressure in my head. The curtains seemed to billow. There might be somebody behind them. The air crackled silently. I had a feeling of colored musical notes floating about, and the scene, I can remark now, was quite like a Klee drawing. I felt a bit queasy, but it passed. The music was louder and the guitar strings beautifully separated. Ralph was looking at me, and I began to laugh. I was going to flip on my tape recorder! What a ridiculous, hilarious thing to do! Why not, though? "Why not?" Frank said, and we both laughed. I couldn't stop. Everything that I could think about was insanely and pitifully funny. The world. The universe. All the poor sweet pitiful people I knew. Myself. What a scene! Filled with noble, ridiculous people! The world, the world!

"This reaction which is Cosmic Laughter was different from any way of laughing I had known. It came out of me as though propelled by a force much larger than the person laughing. It came right up from the center of my being. The force continued throughout the major part of the experience, no matter what I was feeling. It resembled both a mild and sustained electric shock passing through the body and spirit, and a mild and incomplete and continuing orgasm. A throbbing and rhythmic current which for want of a fresh image—and one is no longer afraid of being banal—could be described as the life force shakes you, as if you might be aboard or bestride, or being carried along with, the force that penetrates and then fills all being."

A lot of interesting things in this classic book, which may result in further articles here.

See Reality Studio for more information on David Solomon.

Michael J. Fox on Parkinson's Disease

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:55:00 +0000

Michael J. Fox is a much-loved actor most famous for his endearing roles in the Back To The Future trilogy, Teen Wolf, and the Vietnam-inspired Casualties of War. In 2005, he appeared on James Lipton's Inside The Actor's Studio to talk about his life and career. The last twenty minutes or so of the interview dealt with Fox talking about his diagnosis with Parkinson's Disease as well as his charity work and coping strategies.

I transcribed the relevant parts when it was broadcast on Sky Atlantic recently.

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(The discussion develops from Michael's reminisces of his portrayal of hapless Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty in the acclaimed sitcom Spin City)

James Lipton: Your final one-hour episode received the highest ratings in the show's history. What did you want to achieve in that final episode?

Michael J. Fox: There was a lot of personal stuff going on because I was leaving for health reasons and everybody knew that. And we were kind of dealing with this thing where people know your situation and you want to preserve the purity of the character, and the integrity of what we were trying to do in terms of presenting a fiction. You have to, on some level, find something very similar to it, and we did that in that [the character's] departure was not necessarily voluntary. And in playing that, it was the closest as I've ever been to line between my life and my work. That was the challenge that week and we were all really feeling the pressure. It was one of those things where we were rewriting it every day, trying not to make it too maudlin or over-emotional, but it was so affecting to all of us that it was a tough week.

JL: When did you discover that you had an illness?

MJF: I first felt the symptoms in 1990, but in 1991 I was diagnosed.

JL: As?

MJF: Parkinson's.

JL: And how did you deal with it during the show?

MJF: Well, the first couple of years was just trying not to let anyone know.

JL: How did you tell them?

MJF: It just got to a point where I couldn't hide it any more. I was afraid of the people I was working with, so I decided the time had come.

JL: Told the cast?

MJF: Yeah. (hand trembles as he sips water) As a matter of fact, can I take two minutes?

JL: Do.

MJF: (turns to audience) Because I couldn't do this, what I'm doing now. I need to take two minutes to wait for a pill to kick in.

(MJF walks offstage to take medication, returns few minutes later to applause)

MJF: (to JL and audience) That was basically what was happening during the show. When I was waiting for a pill to kick in, I was waiting to feel better and I knew there was a [full] house out there and I couldn't go out. And I couldn't say 'this is why I can't come out'. I thought, can I be funny if people know I'm sick? Is it OK to laugh at a sick person? So now, just to be able to say 'just give me five minutes' and then come back here and say 'I love it when the drugs kick in'. (audience laughter) So, you know? That's what I needed to do.

(The interview progresses to discussion about Fox's autobiography, Lucky Man)

JL: Where did the book's profits go?

MJF: Any profits I made went to the [Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research].

JL: And what does the Foundation do?

MJF: We're an aggressively entrepreneurial group that are trying to find a cure for Parkinson's.

JL: And how are they doing?

MJF: We're doing pretty good. We clearly haven't finished yet (audience laughter) but it's going really well. There's an amazing group of people that are working on it and amazing support from the public. We've been able to, in the last four years, put $50million towards research. (Audience applaud) Thank you.

JL: (to audience) Michael has said that the biggest thing is that I can be in this situation and love life as much as I do.

MJF: Well, it's funny, it's really not that bad. It's kind of like, as I was saying to my son the other day, it's a disease that makes you uncomfortable. So, all things considered, that's not too bad. I've described it as a gift, and people say to me 'how can you say it's a gift?' I say out loud it's a gift that keeps on taking. (Audience laughter) But it's still a gift that makes one alive. Again, to see what I've lost makes me look at what I've gained and what I have. So it's a tremendous opportunity and for that, I'm really lucky that I'm in this situation where I can help, because people have a relationship with me and feel they know me because of my work. But that goes to the fact that I've been able to do the work and have those relationships in the first place. And if that doesn't make me lucky, I don't know what does.

(Later in the interview, Fox fields questions from the audience members. One question asked further about his Parkinson's Disease.)

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Megan. I'm a first-year actor, and I just ..(cries).. I just wanted to say you're a great inspiration to me. About the same time when you came out and told everyone, I was diagnosed with dystonia which is neurological, covers like half your body. And it was wonderful to see that there could be people out there in the industry who were doing what they loved to do, even if they might be affected by it. So I just wanted to say thank you so much because, having the opportunity to meet you, it means a lot.

Michael J. Fox: Thank you.

Audience Member: (continues) And I also wanted to ask how ... (giggles)... because you're Michael J. Fox and I'm just Megan from Arizona who doesn't know anything or know anyone, how realistic is it for you to come out and tell everybody about what you have and about your disability, and be so open about it?

Michael J. Fox: Well, in a lot of ways my disease made me, once again, Mike Fox from Burnaby. It's a great leveller in a way. One of the things I had difficulty with was when I tried to put people at ease about how I felt and how I was OK with it, and that it was my reality and I accepted it, is that I didn't want to say it's a piece of cake or water off a duck's back. In a way that's a slight to people who really struggle with it and don't have the advantages I have, and have to worry about losing their insurance and their jobs, and have to worry about other people's perceptions. Shortly after I made my situation public, someone said "Oh yeah, that's what Michael J. Fox has", and they felt it made them easier to carry on in this world. That's a tremendous privilege and gift to me to be in that situation. It's purely not my design, it's the way it's worked out.

I think in anything, we're talking about acting, but in life too it really is ... just be honest and do the next right thing, and you'll know what the next right thing is for you. Dystonia is really a challenge. I sometimes get facial dystonia which is awful. It's like, imagine eating a lemon and the face you make, it's stuck like that for half and hour, 45 minutes, and it's quite painful. You just have to go to another place in your head and wait it out until it's done. And it's all about accepting and surrender and saying this is something - not to get too 12-Step - but it's what's in my power, what's in my control. Do I have to throw in the towel and have a tantrum about it? Or kill myself? Or what? None of these are acceptable to me. The only one that's acceptable is to go on and see what happens. And what I find cool is that there is great stuff out there, when you walk through this stuff, when you walk through this fear, when you walk through what people are gonna think about it, or what's gonna happen. Well, something's going to happen and we don't know what is, but chances are at least 50/50 that it'll be pretty good. So I'm willing to take that risk.

Future of Clinical Psychology in the NHS

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:39:00 +0000

Nature (21 April 2011 edition) recently ran a series of special articles on the future of the PhD., all of which asked serious questions about the value of the doctorate in a job market that no longer appears to properly compensate the hard work of students with rewarding careers of their choice. Mark Taylor's editorial was quite frank: "Reform the PhD. system or close it down", suggesting updated and relevant curricula as well as cross-disciplinary communications as ways to move forward, and to discontinue 'redundant' programmes and use their resources for more productive lines.

Noah Gray, a senior editor at Nature, elaborated:

"..At some point we have to expand our view beyond academia and ask which jobs really need a PhD. and which don't. Academia asks a lot from its graduate students and isn't prepared or capable of providing a return on the investment of blood, sweat and tears made by the students. It only seems logical to contract somewhat, for the good of the students who are not aware of this difficult reality, rather than continue to exploit masses of under-compensated labor who may ultimately invest far more energy and time into a endeavor that will not place them in an adequate career."

In general it sounds a lot worse than it is; assuming that the ideas discussed in this series come to fruition, it becomes mainly an attempt at streamlining rather than wholesale cutting down.

It got me pondering the situation in the UK. Two years ago, the Feb 2009 issue of Clinical Psychology Forum (forum magazine of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychological Society) published an interesting article/study regarding the future of clinical psychology placements within the NHS. While it is well known that clinical psychology is a highly competitive area and that more applications are turned down than accepted, there seems to be newer causes for worry other than excellence in academia or training. Harriet Francis-Ehnholm and Tanya Petersen (hereafter "the authors") introduce the topic by describing their attempt to undertake a survey of ClinPsy. trainees and their opinions about clinical psychology during a conference held at the University of Hertfordshire. In the 1990s a shortfall in NHS clinical psychologists was remedied by increasing the number of training places, 583 places were available in 2007 which was a huge improvement from 321 places in 1997. (The situation has improved since; Leeds Clearing House report 617 places were available in 2010, although it is humbling to note that 11,319 applications were made.) However in the face of funding cuts the reduction in the number of clinical psychology posts results in fewer clinical placements for those already in training, leading trainees to wonder about the availability of jobs after completing the course.

To get an idea of the trainees' views, the authors carried out a survey questionnaire that covered three main topics:

What were trainees' thoughts about the future of the profession?
Had working in an 'uncertain' climate affected trainees' views of clinical psychology?
How does the next generation of psychologists intend to make the future more certain?

The surveys were distributed to the sample of 40 trainees, though only 24 returned a response! The results were more or less what one would expect: before the commencement of training job and security expectations were varied, which significantly narrowed after embarking on training and which resulted in envisaging a more constrained career path along with less security and choice. The interesting thing is that despite experiencing negative effects of funding cuts such as low morale and the threat of job cuts/service closures, all of them indicated that they still wanted to continue training to be clinical psychologists. Although it came to light that trainees felt they might benefit from advice on alternatives to working in the NHS and also on how to market the profession effectively to the public, they remained generally optimistic about the future of clinical psychology.

The authors concluded that while University of Hertfordshire trainees were fortunate not to experience the effects of any cuts in training places, they nevertheless experienced the effects of NHS funding crises on their clinical placements and of working in a climate of uncertainty. Now that things have moved on from 2009, that climate is sure to have worsened with service cuts, poor results and the resultant low morale that has emerged in clinical services across the board. A recent blog at The Psychologist by Christian Jarrett reports a disconcerting outlook for psychology as a whole in the UK as a result of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government's spending review; a 50% slashing of PGCE Psychology places, research councils announcing a redirection of neuroscience-allocated funds in line with their research priorities, and a possible restructure of client services.

It all begs the question as to what clinical psychology trainees might think now in this bleaker situation. If the authors' snapshot article is anything to go by, the anxiety and stress felt by current trainees is likely to be amplified even more in this uncertain situation of global economic worries. However, a surprising suggestion of the authors is for the NHS to modify their programmes and training accordingly, even to the extent of suggestion that trainees be provided with teaching in private practice and how to set about this type of work, in spite of the fact that this may cause a conflict of interest (you know, getting trained by the NHS to work in the NHS and then uh,... not doing that).

Considering all of this, what can prospective clinical psychologists look forward to? More uncertainty? Faint light on the horizon? Is it time to call for an open discussion?

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:10:00 +0000

This excellent article by Raymond Tallis appeared in the Fall 2010 edition of the New Atlantic, pp. 3-25.
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There has been much breathless talk of late about all the varied mysteries of human existence that have been or soon will be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. While to live a human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order. This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities, and the present epidemic of such neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines as neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neurosociology, neuropolitics, neurotheology, neurophilosophy, and so on.

The failure to distinguish consciousness from neural activity corrodes our self-understanding in two significant ways. If we are just our brains, and our brains are just evolved organs designed to optimize our odds of survival — or, more precisely, to maximize the replicative potential of the genetic material for which we are the vehicle — then we are merely beasts like any other, equally beholden as apes and centipedes to biological drives. Similarly, if we are just our brains, and our brains are just material objects, then we, and our lives, are merely way stations in the great causal net that is the universe, stretching from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

Most of those who subscribe to such “neuroevolutionary” accounts of humanity don’t recognize these consequences. Or, if they do recognize them, then they don’t subscribe to these accounts sincerely. When John Gray appeals, in his 2002 book Straw Dogs, to a belief that human beings are merely animals and so “human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mold,” he doesn’t really believe that the life of John Gray, erstwhile School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, has no more meaning than that of a slime mold — else why would he have aspired to the life of a distinguished professor rather than something closer to that of a slime mold?

Wrong ideas about what human beings are and how we work, especially if they are endlessly repeated, keep us from thinking about ourselves in ways that may genuinely advance our self-understanding. Indeed, proponents of the neuroscientific account of human behavior hope that it will someday supplant our traditional understandings of mind, behavior, and consciousness, which they dismiss as mere “folk psychology.” According to a 2007 New Yorker profile of professors Paul and Patricia Churchland, two leading “neurophilosophers,” they like “to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor.” The article recounts the occasion Patricia Churchland came home from a vexing day at work and told her husband, “Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.” Such awkward chemical conversation is unlikely to replace “folk psychology” anytime soon, despite the Churchlands’ fervent wishes, if only because it misses the actual human reasons for the reported neurochemical impairments — such as, for example, failing to get one’s favored candidate appointed to a post.

Moreover, there is strong reason to believe that the failure to provide a neuroscientific account of the sufficient conditions of consciousness and conscious behavior is not a temporary state of affairs. It is unlikely that the gap between neuroscientific stories of human behavior and the standard humanistic or common-sense narratives will be closed, even as neuroscience advances and as our tools for observing neural activity grow more sophisticated.

In outlining the case that neuroscience will always have little to say about most aspects of human consciousness, we must not rely on weak mysterian arguments, such as Colin McGinn’s claim, in his famous 1989 Mind paper “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?,” that there may be a neuroscientific answer but we are biologically incapable of figuring it out. Nor is there much use in appealing to arguments about category errors, such as considering thoughts to be “kinds of things,” which were mobilized against mind-body identity theories when philosophy was most linguistically turned, in the middle of the last century. No, the aim of this essay is to give principled reasons, based on examining the nature of human consciousness, for asserting that we are not now and never will be able to account for the mind in terms of neural activity. It will focus on human consciousness — so as to avoid the futility of arguments about where we draw the line between sentient and insentient creatures, because there are more negative consequences to misrepresenting human consciousness than animal, and because it is human consciousness that underlines the difficulty of fitting consciousness into the natural world as understood through strictly materialist science.

This critique of the neural theory of consciousness will begin by taking seriously its own declared account of what actually exists in the world. On this, I appeal to no less an authority than the philosophy professor Daniel Dennett, one of the most prominent spokesmen for the neuroevolutionary reduction of human beings and their minds. In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, Dennett affirms the “prevailing wisdom” that

there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain.... We can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth.

So when we are talking about the brain, we are talking about nothing more than a piece of matter. If we keep this in mind, we will have enough ammunition to demonstrate the necessary failure of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and conscious behavior.

It is a pure dedication to materialism that lies behind another common neuroscientistic claim, one that arises in response to the criticism that there are characteristics of consciousness that neuroscience cannot explain. The response is a strangely triumphant declaration that that which neuroscience cannot grasp does not exist. This declaration is particularly liable to be directed at the self and at free will, those two most persistent “illusions.” But even neuroscientists themselves don’t apply this argument consistently: they don’t doubt that they think they are selves, or that they have the illusion that they act freely — and yet, as we will see, there is no conceivable neural explanation of these phenomena. We are therefore justified in rejecting the presumption that if neuroscience cannot see it, then it does not exist.

The Outward Gaze
A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in Dennett’s words, “the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice” to explain everything else in the material universe.

Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but not how it results in a gaze that looks out. The inward causal path does not deliver your awareness of the glass as an item explicitly separate from you — as over there with respect to yourself, who is over here. This aspect of consciousness is known as intentionality (which is not to be confused with intentions). Intentionality designates the way that we are conscious of something, and that the contents of our consciousness are thus about something; and, in the case of human consciousness, that we are conscious of it as something other than ourselves. But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see. In other words, in intentionality we have something fundamental about consciousness that is left unexplained by the neurological account.

This claim refers to fully developed intentionality and not the kind of putative proto-intentionality that may be ascribed to non-human sentient creatures. Intentionality is utterly mysterious from a material standpoint. This is apparent first because intentionality points in the direction opposite to that of causality: the causal chain has a directionality in space-time pointing from the light wave bouncing off the object to the light wave hitting your visual cortex, whereas your perception of the object refers or points from you back to the object. The referential “pointing back” or “bounce back” is not “feedback” or reverse causation, since the causal arrow is located in physical space and time, whereas the intentional arrow is located in a field of concepts and awareness, a field which is not independent of but stands aside from physical space and time.

Ironically, by locating consciousness in particular parts of the material of the brain, neuroscientism actually underlines this mystery of intentionality, opening up a literal, physical space between conscious experiences and that which they are about. This physical space is, paradoxically, both underlined and annulled: The gap between the glass of which you are aware and the neural impulses that are supposed to be your awareness of it is both a spatial gap and a non-spatial gap. The nerve impulses inside your cranium are six feet away from the glass, and yet, if the nerve impulses reach out or refer to the glass, as it were, they do so by having the glass “inside” them. The task of attempting to express the conceptual space of intentionality in purely physical terms is a dizzying one. The perception of the glass inherently is of the glass, whereas the associated neural activity exists apart from the cause of the light bouncing off the glass. This also means, incidentally, that the neural activity could exist due to a different cause. For example, you could have the same experience of the glass, even if the glass were not present, by tickling the relevant neurons. The resulting perception will be mistaken, because it is of an object that is not in fact physically present before you. But it would be ludicrous to talk of the associated neural activity as itself mistaken; neural activity is not about anything and so can be neither correct nor mistaken.

Let us tease out the mystery of intentionality a bit more, if only to anticipate the usual materialist trick of burying intentionality in causation by brushing past perception to its behavioral consequences. If perceptions really are material effects (in one place — the brain) of material causes (in another place — the object), then intentionality seems to run in the contrary direction to and hence to lie outside causation. That your perception of the glass requires the neural activity in your visual cortex to reach causally upstream to the events that caused it is, again, utterly mysterious. Moreover, it immediately raises two questions. First, why does the backward glance of a set of effects to some of their causes stop at a particular point in the causal chain — in this case, at the glass? And, second, how does this reaching backward create a solid, stable object out of something as unstable as an interference with the light? The ordinary inference implicit in everyday perception is that the events which cause nerve impulses are manifestations of something that transcends those events — namely, an “object” that is the relatively permanent locus of possibility for many future events — making intentionality even more mysterious.

The bounce back is necessary to mark the point at which sense experiences are, as it were, “received”; the same point where, via a variety of intermediate steps, they can trigger behavioral outputs. This is a crucial point of demarcation within the causal nexus between perceptual input and behavioral output. And yet there is nothing within the nervous system that marks this point of arrival, or the point at which arrival passes over into departure (perceptual input into behavioral output). Nor is there anything to distinguish, on the one hand, those parts of the nervous system that are supposed to be the point of arrival of neural activity as a component of conscious experience from, on the other, those parts that are mere unconscious way stations en route to some other point of arrival.

In any event, identifying experiences with neural activity requires that intentionality, which has no place in the material world — since no material object is about any other material object — nevertheless fastens us into the material world. Examination of neural activity reveals only an unbroken causal chain passing from sensory inputs to motor outputs. Intentionality is significant because it is that which opens up the otherwise causally closed physical world. It lies at the root of our being a point of departure in the world, a site at which events originate — that is, of our being actors. And the weaving together of individual intentional spaces creates the human world — that shared, public, temporally deep sphere of possibilities, that outside-of-nature which makes our individual and collective human lives possible. It lies at the origin of everything that distances us from the material world. Without intentionality, there is no point of arrival of perceptions, no point of departure for actions, no input and output, no person located in a world. It is intentionality that opens up the present to the absent, the actual to the possible, and the now to the past and the future, so that we are able to live in a world that is an infinitely elaborated space of possibilities, rather than being simply “wired in” to what is. These are large claims, some of which I have already elaborated in these pages (see “How Can I Possibly Be Free?,” Summer 2010). But the aspects presented here will be enough to wrest ourselves back from being assimilated into our brains.

It should also be noted that looking at the difficulties intentionality poses to materialism relieves us too of the need for the problematic views of (intermittently quite sensible) philosophers such as John Searle, who argues in his famous 1980 paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs” that intentionality “is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena.” Searle says this to undermine computational and functional theories of mind; but he still remains inside the biological frame of reference. And this requires him to think of intentionality — that in virtue of which an effect reaches back to its cause — to be itself the effect of another cause or set of causes. (The functionalism that Searle was rebutting claims that, just as a computer program is defined by how it transforms input to output, a piece of consciousness is defined by the particular causal transformation it effects between an organism’s perceptual input and its behavioral output. But since functionalism tries to assimilate perception into causation by arguing that the contents of consciousness are identical with their causal relations, it is just as easily disposed of by looking carefully at the counter-causal nature of intentionality, and the need for a point of arrival and departure, for input and output, without resorting to Searle’s argument from biological causes.)

Focusing on intentionality and placing it in the context of a materialistic, neuroscientific theory underlines what an extraordinary phenomenon perception is. It is that in virtue of which an object is revealed to a subject; or, rather, that in virtue of which the experiences of a subject are the revelation of an object. And this brings us to the heart of the trouble that the neural theory of perception is in: its central claim is that the interaction between two material objects — either directly, such as by touch, or indirectly, such as by vision — will cause one to appear to the other. The counter-causal direction of intentionality not only shows that this cannot be accommodated in physical science (of which neuroscience is a part) but that appearance is not something that the material world, a nexus of causation, affords. Indeed, we could go further and argue that the progressive enclosure of the world within the framework of physical science, its being construed as a material world, tends towards the elimination of appearance.

Making Appearance Disappear
Physical science begins when we escape from our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement, and thereby start to aspire towards Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere.” You think the table over there is large; I think it is small. We make a measurement and discover that it is two feet by two feet. We now characterize the table in a way that is less beholden to our own, or anyone else’s, personal experience. Or we terminate an argument about whether the table is light or dark brown by translating its color into a mixture of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The table has lost contact with its phenomenal appearance to me, to you, or to anyone, as being characteristic of what it is.

As science progresses, measurement takes us further from actual experience, and the phenomena of subjective consciousness, to a realm in which things are described in abstract, general quantitative terms. The most obvious symptom of this is the way physical science has to discard what it regards as “secondary qualities” — such as color experiences, feelings of warmth and cold, and tastes. They are regarded as somehow unreal, or at least as falling short of describing what the furniture of the world is “in itself.” For the physicist, light is not in itself bright or colorful; rather, it is a mixture of vibrations of different frequencies in an electromagnetic field. The material world, far from being the colorful, noisy, smelly place we experience, is purportedly instead composed only of colorless, silent, odorless atoms or quarks, or other basic particles and waves best described mathematically.

Physical science is thus about the marginalization, and ultimately the elimination, of phenomenal appearance. But consciousness is centrally about appearances. The basic contents of consciousness are these mere “secondary qualities.” They are what fill our every conscious moment. As science advances, it retreats from appearances towards quantifying items that do not in themselves have the kinds of manifestation that constitute our experiences. A biophysical account of consciousness, which sees consciousness in terms of nerve impulses that are the passage of ions through semi-permeable membranes, must be a contradiction in terms. For such an account must ultimately be a physical account, and physical science does not admit the existence of anything that would show why a physical object such as a brain should find, uncover, create, produce, result in, or cause the emergence of appearances and, in particular, secondary qualities in the world. Galileo’s famous assertions that the book of nature “is written in the language of mathematics” and that “tastes, odors, colors ... reside only in consciousness,” and would be “wiped out and annihilated” in a world devoid of conscious creatures, underline the connection, going back to the very earliest days of modern physical science, between quantification and the disappearance of appearance.

Any explanation of consciousness that admits the existence of appearances but is rooted in materialist science will fail because, on its own account, matter and energy do not intrinsically have appearances, never mind those corresponding to secondary qualities. We could, of course, by all means change our notion of matter; but if we do not, and the brain is a piece of matter, then it cannot explain the experience of things. Those who imagine that consciousness of material objects could arise from the effect of some material objects on another particular material object don’t seem to take the notion of matter seriously.

Some neurophilosophers might respond that science does not eliminate appearance; rather, it replaces one appearance with another — fickle immediate and conscious appearance with one that is more true to the reality of the objects it attends to. But this is not what science does — least of all physical science, which is supposed to give us the final report on what there is in the universe, for which matter (or mass-energy) is the ultimate reality, and equations linking quantities are the best way of revealing the inner essence of this reality. For, again, it is of the very nature of mass-energy, as it is envisaged in physics, not to have any kind of appearance in itself.

This lack of appearance to mass-energy may still seem counterintuitive, but it will become clearer when we examine a well-known defense, again made by John Searle, of the theory that mind and brain are identical — or specifically, that experiences can be found in neural impulses because they are the same thing. In his 1983 book Intentionality, Searle — who, as already noted, is committed to a neural account of consciousness — addresses the most obvious problem associated with the claim that experiences are identical with neural activity: experiences are nothing like neural activity, and the least one might expect of something is that it should be like itself.

Searle denies that this is a problem by arguing that neural activity and experiences are different aspects of the same stuff; more precisely, that they are the same stuff seen at “different levels.” The immediate problem with this claim is in knowing what it means. Clearly, neural activity and experiences are not two aspects of the same thing in the way that the front and back of a house are two aspects of the same house. Searle tries to clarify what he means using an analogy: experience is related to neural activity, he says, as “liquid properties of water” are related to “the behavior of the individual molecules” of H₂O. They are the same stuff even though molecules of H₂O are nothing like water. Water is wet, he argues, while individual molecules are not.

Wetness is the one specific “liquid” property of water he cites at the outset, and the only others he mentions are that “it pours, you can drink it, you can wash in it, etc.” Because of this, it may seem at first that all Searle has accomplished is isolating the experiential qualities of water from the non-experiential. That is, one interpretation of Searle’s supposed explanation is that neural activity is related to experience in the same way water is related to experiences of water. This explanation, of course, is completely inadequate, because it simply sets us at a further regress from the answer.

But it turns out that this interpretation of Searle’s argument is the charitable one. We can see why in a section where Searle responds to this famous argument made by Leibniz in The Monadology (1714):

And supposing that there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, we could conceive of it as enlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so that we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push against another, but never anything by which to explain perception. This must be sought for, therefore, in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.

Searle’s response:

An exactly parallel argument to Leibniz’s would be that the behavior of H₂O molecules can never explain the liquidity of water, because if we entered into the system of molecules “as into a mill we should only find on visiting it pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain” liquidity. But in both cases we would be looking at the system at the wrong level. The liquidity of water is not to be found at the level of the individual molecule, nor [is] the visual perception ... to be found at the level of the individual neuron or synapse.

The key to understanding Searle’s argument and its fatal flaw is in the words, “But in both cases we would be looking at the system.” It turns out that in this water/H₂O analogy, it is not just the water but both levels that are already levels of experience or of observation. Searle in fact requires experience, observation, description — in short, consciousness — to generate the two levels of his water analogy, which are meant to sustain his argument that two stuffs can be the same stuff even if they do not look like one another. This supposed explanation evades the question of experience even more than does the first. For what Searle is in effect arguing, though he does not seem to notice it, is that the relationship between neural activity and experience is like the relationship between two kinds of experience of the same stuff. And this is unsatisfactory because the problem he is supposedly solving is that neural impulses are not like experiences at all. (This rebuttal also applies — even more obviously, in fact — to another, very popular analogy, between dots of newsprint and a picture in the newspaper as neural activity and experiences. The dots/picture analogy also has the benefit of making clear another vulnerability of such analogies: the suggestion that neural activity is “micro” while experiences are “macro,” when it is not at all evident why that should be the case.)

Some will object to this experiential characterization of the “levels” argument, and will formulate it instead in terms of levels of organization or complexity: for example, the Earth’s climate and weather system is organized into many different levels of complexity, each exhibiting distinct behavior and distinct sorts of phenomena, from the interplays causing cycles of temperature over the centuries, down to the behavior of storms, down to the interactions of molecules. The implicit idea is that each level of complexity is governed by its own distinct set of laws. But one cannot take the distinction between these sets of laws to be inherent in the climate/weather system without in effect saying that when enough matter gets together in the same vicinity, it becomes another kind of matter which falls under the scope of another kind of law (at the same time that it remains the more basic kind of matter under the scope of the more basic kind of law). That flies in the face of reductive materialism — not to mention raises some very difficult questions about the identicality of these different kinds of matter. What is more, the “getting together” that makes, say, a storm a whole made out of parts, is itself description-dependent and hence perception-dependent. The very term “complexity” refers to a description-dependent property. A pebble may be seen as something very simple — one pebble — or something infinitely complex — a system of a trillion trillion sub-atomic particles interacting in such a way as to sustain a static equilibrium.

The persistent materialist may launch a final defense of the argument, to the effect that the particular descriptions of water and H₂O molecules Searle mentions do not really depend on experience at all. He writes, “In its liquid state water is wet, it pours, you can drink it, you can wash in it, etc.... When we describe the stuff as liquid we are just describing those very molecules at a higher level of description than that of the individual molecule.” One might argue that these enumerated qualities of water are all physical facts, that they are true even when there is no one present to observe them. But to the extent that this reinterpretation of Searle’s argument helps it to hold water (so to speak), it is only due to the original argument’s imprecision. For if we take it to be truly independent of experience that water “is wet, it pours, you can drink it, you can wash in it,” then these facts are equally true of a collection of molecules of H₂O, because of course the physical stuff known as water just is a collection of molecules of H₂O. Water and H₂O molecules, considered solely as physical things, are identical, and have all of the same properties. No appeal to “levels of description” should even be necessary. The reason it is necessary hinges on Searle’s description of one level as that of “the individual molecule.” But an individual molecule is not at all the same thing as water — which is a collection of many individual molecules — and so of course we should not expect the two to have the same properties. If we remove from the analogy the differing appearances to us of water and H₂O molecules as sources of their un-likeness, then all Searle has demonstrated is how a thing can be unlike a part of itself, rather than unlike itself. This is trivially true, and does not apply in any event to the question at hand if neural impulses are taken to be identical to experiences.

Searle makes his position even more vulnerable by arguing that not only are neural activity and the experience of perception the same but that the former causes the latter just as water is “caused” by H₂O. This is desperate stuff: one could hardly expect some thing A to cause some thing B with which it is identical, because nothing can cause itself. In any event, the bottom line is that the molecules of H₂O and the wet stuff that is water are two appearances of the same thing — two conscious takes on the same stuff. They cannot be analogous to, respectively, that which supposedly causes conscious experiences (neural impulses) and conscious experiences themselves.

What Physical Science is Blind To
To press this point a little harder: conscious experiences and observed nerve impulses are both appearances. But nerve impulses do not have any appearance in themselves; they require a conscious subject observing them to appear — and it is irrelevant that the observation is highly mediated through instrumentation. Like all material items, nerve impulses lack appearances absent an observer. And given that they are material events lacking appearances in themselves, there is no reason why they should bring about the appearances of things other than themselves. It is magical thinking to imagine that material events in a material object should be appearings of objects other than themselves. Material objects require consciousness in order to appear.

All Searle has explained, again, is how two different appearances of the same thing can be unlike each other; but the problem he means to solve in the first place — or should mean to solve — is how something that itself has no appearance can give rise to, in fact be identical to, appearances. That is, Searle’s task is to show how something that itself has no appearance can be an appearance — and without someone else observing the thing so as to give it the appearance. The question becomes pointed in Leibniz’s thought experiment: how, from looking at the raw material of neurons in someone’s brain, are we, as outside observers, supposed to get the appearances these neurons are meant to be causing, or generating, or identical to? Searle is forced into this conclusion: “If one knew the principles on which the system of H₂O molecules worked, one could infer that it was in a liquid state by observing the movement of the molecules, but similarly if one knew the principles on which the brain worked one could infer that it was in a state of thirst or having a visual experience.” In other words, just by looking at neural impulses and “translating” them into the other “level of description,” we can get at the corresponding experiences. This sounds fine until we consider just what “getting at” those experiences means. For what Searle does not account for is how knowing that a particular brain is having a particular experience is supposed to be enough to deliver actually having that experience yourself. To fully accept Searle’s conclusion, we would have to believe that having the experience is the same as knowing that it exists — that it arises for the one person experiencing it, perhaps, from some implicit act of translation or “inference” — and so, among other things, that just by looking at someone else’s brain in the proper way, we could have the same experiences they are having. These are absurd conclusions, as we will see.

From a more practical standpoint, we can see why it will never be enough to dismiss the problem of appearances out of hand by appealing either to the idea that perceptions are just brain activity like any other brain activity, or the idea that consciousness (and so all appearance) is an illusion. For in either case, while appearances are “nothing but” neural activity, we still must be able to explain why some neural activity leads to the sensation (or illusion) of appearance while other neural activity does not; and we must be able to distinguish between the two by looking only at the material neurons. Neurophilosophers should be able to recognize this problem, since they acknowledge that the vast majority of neural impulses are not associated with appearances or consciousness of any sort. The search for neural correlates of consciousness has in fact turned up clusters, patterns, and locations of activity that are not in any significant respect different from neural activity that is not so correlated. What is more, “clusters,” “patterns,” and so forth also require an observer, to bring them together into a unity and to see that unity as a unity. That which requires an observer cannot be the basis of an observation.

The fact that intentionality does not fit into the materialist world picture has often been noted, but it is important to emphasize its anomalous nature because it lies at the root of pretty well everything that distances us from the material world, including other animals. The nature of intentionality becomes most clear when we see that the perceiver is an embodied subject — when the object is related to an “I” who perceives it, and who experiences himself as being located in the same experiential field as the object. The requirement of admitting the existence of a perceiving self is, of course, enough to make neurophilosophers hostile to the notion of the subject. But if they deny the existence of a self, they still have to account for how it is that matter can be arranged around a viewpoint as “near,” “far,” and so forth — for the construction of what Bertrand Russell called “egocentric space,” in which indexical words like “this,” “that,” and “here” find their meanings.

There are no appearances without viewpoints: for example, there are no appearances of a rock that are neither from the front of it nor from the back of it nor from any other angle. But there is nothing in the material brain, as we have seen, that could make it anyone’s own brain, or that could locate it at the center of anyone’s sensory field as the foundation of a viewpoint. We cannot appeal to the objective fact that the brain is located in a particular body to install it as someone’s brain, because ownership does not reside in bodies absent consciousness, or indeed self-consciousness — but consciousness is just what we are unable to find by looking at the material of the brain. Nor is the fact that the brain is located at a particular point in space sufficient for making it the center of a particular someone’s personal space any more than that fact is sufficient for a rock to have its own personal space.

The “view from nowhere” of physical science does not accommodate viewpoints. And since the material world has of itself no viewpoints, it does not, of itself, have centers — or, for that matter, peripheries. The equation E=mc², like all laws of physics, captures an ultimate, all-encompassing scientific truth about the world, a viewless view of material reality, and has nothing to say about the experience of the world. Absent from it is that which forms the basic contents of consciousness: the phenomenal appearances of the world.

Mysteries of the Subjective Self

The loss of appearances is not an accidental mislaying. It is an inevitable consequence of the materialist conception of matter as we have it today. The brain, being a piece of matter, must be person-free. This is true not only by definition but also in other, specific senses. Persons — or selves — have two additional features which cannot be captured in neural terms.

The first is unity in multiplicity. At any given moment, I am aware of a multitude of experiences: sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, emotions. I am co-conscious of them — that is, I am aware of each of them at once, so that they are integrated into a unity of sorts. Moreover, co-consciousness includes consciousness of things I cannot currently see or touch: it includes consciousness of the absent past, of the absent elsewhere of the present, and of the possible future.

It is difficult to see how this integration is possible in neural terms, since neurophysiology assigns these experiences to spatially different parts of the brain. Aspects of consciousness are supposedly kept very tidily apart: the pathways for perception are separate from those for emotion, which are separate from those for memory, which are separate from those for motivation, which are separate from those for judgment, and so on. Within perception, each of the senses of vision, hearing, smell, and so forth has different pathways and destinations. And within, say, visual perception, different parts of the brain are supposed to be responsible for receiving the color, shape, distance, classification, purpose, and emotional significance of seen objects. When, however, I see my red hat on the table, over there, and see that it is squashed, and feel cross about it, while I hear you laughing, and I recognize the laughter as yours, and I am upset, and I note that the taxi I have ordered has arrived so that I can catch the train that I am aware I must not miss — when all of these things occur in my consciousness at once, many things that are kept apart must somehow be brought together. There is no model of such synthesis in the brain. This is the so-called “binding” problem.

Converging neural pathways might seem to offer a means by which things are all brought together — this is the standard neurophysiological account of “integration.” However, it solves nothing. If all those components of the moment of consciousness came together in the same spot, if their activity converged, they would lose their separate identity and the distinct elements would be lost in a meaningless mush. When I look at my hat, I see that it is red, and squashed, and over there, and a hat, and all of the rest. Here is the challenge presented to neuroscience by the experienced unity and multiplicity of the conscious moment: that which is brought together has also to be kept apart. Consciousness is a unification that retains multiplicity.

Neurophilosophers have tried to deal with this problem by arguing that, while the components of experience retain their individual locations in the brain, the activity that occurs in those different locations is bound together. The mechanism for this binding is supposed to be either rhythmic mass neural activity or emergent physical forces which transcend the boundaries of individual neurons, such as electromagnetic fields or quantum coherence arising out of the properties of nerve membranes. This way of imagining the unity of consciousness assumes, without any reason, that linked activity across large sections of the brain — say, a coherent pattern of rhythmic activity, made visible as such to an observer by instrumentation — will be translated, or more precisely will translate itself, from an objective fact to a subjective unity. We are required to accept that something that is observed as an internal whole — via instrumentation — will be experienced as a whole, or itself be the experience of a whole, such that it will deliver the wholeness of a subset of items in the world while at the very same time retaining the separateness of those items.

The other distinctive feature of subjectivity is temporal depth. The human subject is aware of a past (his own and the shared past of communities and cultures) and reaches into a future (his own and the shared future). For simplicity’s sake, let us just focus on the past. There are many neurophilosophical accounts of memory, but they have one thing in common: they see memory as, in the slightly scornful phrase of the philosopher Henri Bergson, “a cerebral deposit.” Memory is, to use the slippery term, “stored” as an effect on the brain, expressed in its altered reactivity. This theory has been demonstrated, to the satisfaction of many neurophysiologists and cognitive neuroscientists, in creatures as disparate as apes and fruit flies. Some of the most lauded studies on “memory,” such as those that won Columbia University neuroscientist Eric Kandel his 2000 Nobel Prize, have been on the sea slug.

In reality, Kandel did not examine anything that should really be called memory — it was actually altered behavior in response to training by means of an electric shock — essentially a conditioned reflex. A sea slug does not, so far as anybody knows, have semantic memory of facts — that is, memory of facts as facts, laden with concepts. It does not have explicit episodic memories of events — that is, events remembered as located in the past. Nor does it have autobiographical memories — that is, events remembered as located in its own past. It does not even have an explicit sense of the past or of time in general, and even less of a collective past where shared history is located. Nor can one seriously imagine an elderly sea slug actively trying to remember earlier events, racking its meager allocation of twenty thousand neurons to recall something, any more than one can think of it feeling nostalgic for its youth when it believed that it still had a marvelous life ahead of it.

Of course, neurophilosophers are not impressed by the objection that the sea slug or any other animal model does not possess anything like the kind of memory that we possess. It is, they say, simply a matter of different degrees of complexity of the nervous system in question: explicit memories involve more elaborate circuitry, with more intermediate connections, than the kinds of conditioned reflexes observed in sea slugs. To dissect this response, we have to examine critically the very idea that memories are identical with altered states of a nervous system. Let us look first of all at how the fallacy commanded acceptance. Kandel, like many other researchers, seems to assimilate all memory into habit memory, and habit memory in turn into altered behavior, or altered reactivity of the organism. And altered reactivity can be correlated with the altered properties of the excitable tissue in the organism, which may be understood in biophysical, biochemical, or neurochemical terms — the kinds of chemical changes one can see in the contents of a Petri dish. But these changes have nothing to do with memory as we experience and value it, though they have everything to do with overlooking the true nature of memory.

This is because habit memory is merely implicit, while human memory is also explicit: the former sort of “memory” is merely altered behavior, while the latter is something one is aware of as a memory. Those who think this a false elevation of the human must address not only the fact that there are two broad categories of memory to be found among animal species, but that both of these types of memory coexist in human beings. We not only have uniquely explicit memory, but also have the same sort of implicit memory as Kandel’s sea slugs. Moreover, we can have both of these types of memory about the same event: After a spark from a doorknob shocks my hand as I close the door during the winter, I will instinctively flinch from touching it again, and will then stop and explicitly remember that I had previously received an electrostatic shock. This time, I will explicitly plan to shut the door with my foot, an act that will itself after a few repetitions become instinctive or implicit, until I again stop to recall the explicit memory of the event that led to the habit. The neurophysiological account fails to address these distinctions.

To get to the bottom of the fallacies that underlie the very idea of a “neurophysiology of memory,” we need to remind ourselves that the nervous system is a material object and that material objects are identical with their present states. A broken cup is a broken cup. It is not in itself a record of its previous states — of a cup that was once whole — except to an outside observer who previously saw the cup in its unbroken state and now remembers it, so that he or she can compare the past and present states of the cup. The broken cup has an altered reactivity — it moves differently in response to stimuli — but this altered reactivity is not a memory of its previous state or of the event that caused its altered reactivity, namely its having been dropped. Likewise, although the altered state of the sea slug is, as it were, a “record” of what has happened to it, it is a record only to an external consciousness that has observed it in both its past and present states and is aware of both. And this is equally true of the altered reactivity of neurons exposed to previous stimuli in higher organisms.

Indeed, just as a conscious observer is required for the present state of the broken cup to be regarded as a “record” or “memory” of its having been dropped, so it must be a consciousness that identifies the particular piece of matter of the cup as a single object distinct from its surroundings, having its own distinct causal history, of which there is one special event among all others of which the cup is a “record”: its being dropped. From a consciousness-free material standpoint, the cup is but an arbitrary subset of all matter, and its present state owes equally to every prior state of the matter that composes it. The cup would have to be at once a “memory” of the moment it was dropped and of the innumerable moments when it sat motionless in the cupboard — with the former in no way privileged. In fact, if you believe that the present state of an object is a record or memory of all the events that brought it to its present state, you are committed to believing that, at any given moment, the universe is a memory of all its previous states. This need not be so, of course, if an object is encountered by a conscious individual who can see its present state as a sign of its past state, and so can focus on salient causes of salient aspects — for example, the event that led to the cup being broken. The conscious individual alone can see the present state as a sign of a past state and pick out one present state as a sign of one of the events that brought it from its past state to its present state.

This final point illustrates how the effect of an experienced event is a record of this event only to an observer. But the brain, being a material object, cannot be its own observer, comparing its past and present states. More precisely, the present state of a portion of the brain cannot reach out or refer, by the temporal equivalent of intentionality, to those salient events that changed it from an earlier state. And yet this is what memory does. Memories, that is to say, have an even more mysterious and counter-causal about-ness than perceptions of present events: they reach back to previous experiences, which themselves, through perception, reached out to that which, according to orthodox neuroscience, caused the experience. Memories supposedly therefore reach back to the mental causes of their physical causes. What is more, just as in vision I see the object as separate from myself, in memory I see the remembered object as different from the present, from the totality of what is here — I see it as absent. The memory explicitly locates its intentional object in the past. To borrow a phrase that Roger Scruton used in relation to music, memories have a double intentionality.

The failure of neuroscientism to deal with this last twist of the knife is illustrated by a recent paper in Science which some regarded triumphantly as having nailed memory. The authors found that the same neurons were active when an individual watched a TV scene (from, of all things, The Simpsons) as when they were asked to remember it. Memory, they concluded, is simply the replication of the neural activity that was provoked by the event that is remembered. This fails to distinguish, and so leaves unexplained, how it is that an individual experiences a memory as a memory rather than as something present — or, actually, a hallucination of something present.

A putative neural account of memory cannot deal with the difference between perceptions and memories because there is no past tense — or indeed future tense — in the material world. Consciousness, with its implicit sense of “now,” is required to locate events in one panel or other of the triptych past, present, and future; it is the conscious subject that provides the reference point. This is why Einstein said that physicists “know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” A consistent materialism should not allow for the possibility of memory, of the sense of the past. It only manages to seem to do so because observers, viewpoint, and consciousness are smuggled into the descriptions of the successive states of the brain, making it seem that later states can be about earlier states.

As if the unity of the self or subject or “I” at a particular time were not sufficiently resistant to neurological explanation, the unity of the self over time is even further beyond its reach. The objective endurance of the brain does not generate the sensed co-presence of successive states of the self, even less the sense that one has temporal depth. Even if the self were reduced to a series of experiences, as in the accounts of David Hume or Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, it would not be possible to see how the series was explicit as a series, with different moments explicitly related to each other, where one part accessed another and saw that it belonged to the same self. Indeed, starving the self down into a mere implicit thread linking successive experiences renders it less, not more, amenable to neural reduction, since the question of why some particular set of successive experiences rather than another should be linked together as a single series becomes even more glaring when the experiences are seen as but some arbitrary physical events among other physical events occurring in many different locations in physical space.

And the problem is by no means absolved if the sense of self is — as claimed by some neuroscientists, like so many other things they are unable to explain — an illusion. My feeling that I am the same person as the person who married my wife in 1970 is just as impossible to explain neurologically if it is an illusion as if it is true. Neural activity does not have the wherewithal to create the sense that we have of feeling that we are the same individual at different times — just as little if the sense is illusory as if it is true. The notion that the material brain can produce the illusion of the self but not be the basis of the real thing seems, to put it mildly, rather odd. And what is it to which the illusion is presented? Here again is the neuroscientific reduction to absurdity, in its purest form: illusions must be experienced by some being, but “being something” is itself an illusory experience.

An Insincere Materialism

The belief among neurophilosophers that the brain, a material object, can generate tensed time is one among many manifestations of the insincerity of their materialism. As we have seen, under cover of hard-line materialism, they borrow consciousness from elsewhere, smuggling it into, or presupposing it in, their descriptions of brain activity. This ploy is facilitated by a mode of speaking which I call “thinking by transferred epithet,” in which mental properties are ascribed to the brain or to parts of the brain (frequently very tiny parts, even individual neurons), which are credited with “signaling,” and often very complex acts such as “rewarding,” “informing,” and so forth. The use of transferred epithets is the linguistic symptom of what Oxford philosopher P.M.S. Hacker and University of Sydney neuroscientist M.R. Bennett described, in their 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, as the “mereological fallacy”: ascribing to parts properties which truly belong to wholes. This fallacy bids fair to be described as the Original Sin of much neurotalk, and it certainly allows the mind-brain barrier to be trespassed with ease.

This ease is in turn concealed by the ubiquity of transferred epithets outside brain science in everyday life. We are so used to talking about machines (particularly computers) “detecting,” “signaling,” “recording,” “remembering,” “warning,” and so forth, that we hardly notice, even less object, when this talk is applied to brains. Indeed, given that the brain is often billed as the most sophisticated of all machines, the computer to end all computers, it hardly needs to demonstrate its entitlement to being credited with such activities. While the homunculus is out of fashion, and ghosts have been exorcised from the machine, there are apparently billions of micro-homunculi haunting the cerebral cortex. The exiled homunculus has crept back in the form of a million billion angels bearing messages from one part of the brain to another, chattering endlessly across synapses.

This absurdity is concealed yet more deeply by a mode of speech that populates even the material environment that surrounds the brain with “signals” and “messages” and “information.” All the nervous system has to do is to extract and transmit those signals and messages and information. The Princeton psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird, a leading figure of the school of thought that held that the brain-mind is a computer, stated in his 1988 book The Computer and the Mind that “light reflected from surfaces and focused on the retinae contains a large amount of information.” (Gossipy stuff, light.) He admitted, however, that there were no entirely free gifts:

No matter how much information is in the light falling on the retinae, there must be a mental mechanism for recovering the identities of the things in a scene and those of their properties that vision makes explicit to consciousness.

Nevertheless, stipulating that there is information in the energy tickling up the brain is a flying start, and gets you across the brain-consciousness barrier without any scientific or indeed conceptual work being done. The otherwise inexplicable miracle by which the brain is supposed to support intelligent consciousness is made rather easier to understand when the energy that impinges on it is billed as information — information “about” the brain’s surroundings.

This trend, incidentally, is the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which much lunacy lies. Information, once freed from the confinement of conscious human beings offering information to other human beings requiring to be informed, is everywhere. It is in the light; it is in DNA and other structures of the body. It is even in the material transactions of the non-living universe, as has been suggested by the advocates of “digital physics” — the idea that the universe is computation. By such misuse of language, matter becomes consciousness, or the energy in the material world comes to know itself, as has been suggested by the advocates of “panpsychism” — the idea that all matter is at least partially conscious.

The promotion of energy to information is the inverse of the demotion of consciousness to material transactions. In one direction, consciousness is in nothing; in the other, it is in everything. It gets right to the heart of how inherently absurd and paradoxical is neuroscientism to recognize that it naturally splits into these two wholly and fundamentally opposed modes of thinking, yet relies simultaneously on them both.

Finding Ourselves

We can see more clearly now the wide gap between brain function and consciousness — really, between people and their brains. This gap is seemingly crossed by linguistic legerdemain: people can be “brainified” if the brain is personified. But we have seen reasons why this gap should be unbridgeable. This, however, only throws into greater relief the magnitude of what remains to be answered, and so we must ask where we go from here. The failure to explain consciousness in terms of the brain — which follows from the failure of matter as understood in the most rigorous scientific manner to be able to house consciousness — raises two immediate questions.

The first and most obvious question is: Why, if the brain is not the basis of consciousness, is it so intimately bound up with it? Even those of us who object to the reduction of persons to brains have to explain why, of all the objects in the world, the brain is so relevant to our lives as persons. Nor can we overlook the extraordinary advances that have come from neuroscience in our ability to understand and treat diseases that damage voluntary action, consciousness, and mood — something that has been central to my entire professional career as a clinical neuroscientist. If consciousness, mind, volition, and so forth are not deeply connected with brain activity, then what are we to make of the genuine advances that neuroscience has contributed to our management of conditions that affect these central underpinnings of ordinary life?

The second question is whether, having shown the difficulty — no, the impossibility — of trying to get from brains alone to persons, we should abandon the very notion of the brain as a starting point for our thoughts about human consciousness. This question, however, brings us back to the first. If we say “I wouldn’t start from here,” then what do we do with the facts of neuroscience? Where does the brain fit into a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ontology of mind that deny the brain a place at their center? If we are thinking of a new ontology, an account of the kinds of things there are in the universe that goes beyond the traditional division into mental and physical things; or if we are to go beyond an interactive epistemology that begins with sensations arising out of the impingement of energy on our brains and ascends to our knowledge of the laws of nature; then how shall we make sense of the things neuroscience tells us? How shall we deal with the fact that we are evolved organisms as well as persons?

These questions are posed because the case outlined here has been, necessarily, quite negative. It has merely been meant to clear the decks so we can set sail on the real work of finding a positive description of our nature, of the place of mind in nature, and, possibly, of the nature of nature itself. We need to start again thinking about our hybrid status: as pieces of matter subject to the laws of physics, as organisms subject to the laws of biology, and as people who have a complex sense of themselves, who narrate and lead their lives, and who are capable of thinking thoughts like these.

Raymond Tallis, emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, is the author, most recently, of Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence (Yale, 2010) and Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen, forthcoming in 2011). This essay has been adapted from a lecture delivered in February 2010 at the American Enterprise Institute.

Raymond Tallis, "What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves," The New Atlantis, Number 29, Fall 2010, pp. 3-25.

Faster Than The Speed Of Light?

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

I'd like to put up this excellent short piece by W. Daniel Hillis, the renowned computer scientist and engineer. It was originally published in How Things Are: A Science Toolkit for the Mind by John & Katinka Brockman (1996), and it outlines the bare basics of why it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. This may bring disappointment to sci-fi movie fans with a liking for 'time travel' movies, which often propagate the idea that time travel is possible after travelling faster than light speed. Far from shattering illusions of the possibility of doing so at some point in the future, this article actually serves as a quick crash course into a basic issue of physics. Slightly technical in the beginning but gets easier and easier to understand, eventually resulting in a realisation of learning. Enjoy.

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Special Relativity: Why Can't You Go Faster Than Light?

You've probably heard that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but have you ever wondered how this rule gets enforced? What happens when you're cruising along in your spaceship and you go faster and faster until you hit the light barrier? Do the dilithium crystals that power your engine suddenly melt down? Do you vanish from the known universe? Do you go backward in time? The correct answer is none of the above. Don't feel bad if you don't know it; no one in the world knew it until Albert Einstein worked it out.

Image courtesy: Fx-1988

The easiest way to understand Einstein's explanation is to understand the simple equation that you've probably seen before: e = mc². In order to understand this equation, let's consider a similar equation, one for converting between square inches and square feet. If i is the number of square inches and f is the number of square feet, then we can write the equation: i = 144f. The 144 comes from squaring the number of inches per foot (12² = 144). Another way of writing the same equation would be i = c²f, where c in this case is equal to 12 inches per foot. Depending on what units we use, this equation can be used to convert any measure of area to any other measure of area; just the constant c will be different. For example, the same equation can be used for converting square yards to square meters, where c² is 0.9144, the number of yards per meter. The c² is just the conversion constant.

The reason why these area equations work is that square feet and square inches are different ways of measuring the same thing, namely area. What Einstein realized, to everyone's surprise, was that energy and mass are also just two different ways of measuring the same thing. It turns out that just a little bit of mass is equal to a whole lot of energy, so in the equation, the conversion constant is very large. For example, if we measure mass in kilograms and energy in joules, the equation can be written like this: e = 90,000,000,000,000,000 m. This means, for example, that a charged-up battery (which contains about one million joules of energy) weighs about 0.0000000001 grams more than a battery that has been discharged.

If we work with different units, the conversion constant will be different. For instance, if we measure mass in tons and energy in BTUs, then c will be 93,856,000,000,000,000. (It happens to work out that the conversion constant in a particular set of units is always the speed of light in those units, but that is another story.) If we measure both energy and mass in what physicists call 'the natural units' (in which c = 1), we would write the equation: e = m, which makes it easier to understand; it just means that energy and mass are the same thing.

It doesn't matter whether the energy is electrical energy, chemical energy, or even atomic energy. It all weighs the same amount per unit of energy. In fact, the equation even works with something physicists call 'kinetic' energy, that is, the energy something has when it is moving. For example, when I throw a baseball, I put energy into the baseball by pushing it with my arm. According to Einstein's equation, the baseball actually gets heavier when I throw it. (A physicist might get picky here and distinguish between something getting heavier and something gaining mass, but I'm not going to try. The point is that the ball becomes harder to throw.) The faster I throw the baseball, the heavier it gets. Using Einstein's equation, e = mc², I calculate that if I could throw a baseball one hundred miles per hour (which I can't, but a good pitcher can), then the baseball actually gets heavier by 0.000000000002 grams - which is not much.

Now, let's go back to your starship. Let's assume that your engines are powered by tapping into some external source, so you don't have to worry about carrying fuel. As you get going faster and faster in your starship, you are putting more and more energy into the ship by speeding it up, so the ship keeps getting heavier. (Again, I should really be saying 'massier' not 'heavier' since there is no gravity in space.) By the time you reach 90 percent of the speed of light, the ship has so much energy in it that it actually has about twice the mass as the ship has at rest. It gets harder and harder to propel with the engines, because it's so heavy. As you get closer to the speed of light, you begin to get diminishing returns - the more energy the ship has, the heavier it gets, so the more energy must be put into it to speed it up just a little bit, the heavier it gets, and so on.

The effect is even worse than you might think because of what is going on inside the ship. After all, everything inside the ship, including you, is speeding up, getting more and more energy, and getting heavier and heavier. In fact, you and all the machines on the ship are getting pretty sluggish. Your watch, for instance, which used to weigh half an ounce, now weighs about forty tons. And the spring inside your watch really hasn't gotten any stronger, so the watch has slowed way down so that it only ticks once an hour. Not only has your watch slowed down, but the biological clock inside your head has also slowed down. You don't notice this because your neurons are getting heavier, and your thoughts are slowed down by exactly the same amount as the watch. As far as you are concerned, your watch is just ticking along at the same rate as before. (Physicists call this 'relativistic time contraction.')

The other thing that is slowed down is all of the machinery that is powering your engines (the dilithium crystals are getting heavier and slower, too). So your ship is getting heavier, your engines are getting sluggish, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the worse it gets. It just gets harder and harder and harder, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get over the light barrier.

And that's why you can't go faster than the speed of light.

The Twins Who Share A Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:47:00 +0000

Channel 4 recently broadcast an interesting documentary as part of their 'Bodyshock' series, dealing with a set of twins who are joined at the head. I wrote some notes while watching the documentary:

Tatiana and Krista Hogan are regarded as a 'medical marvel'. While instances of twins being born joined at the heads are rare, ithis particular case is certainly a marvel in living memory. Their mother, Felicia Hogan, discovered this information at her 21-week scan. As she was 21 years of age at the time and already had two older children, the medical staff offered her the option to have a termination in view of the weight of responsibilities she would have if she went through with the birth. Felicia opted against the offer and, at the time of birth, doctors were surprised at the survival of both mother and babies. They also noticed something strange: when one twin was injected, the other spontaneously cried. Further observations from family as the twins were growing up, such as one twin 'zoning out' when looking at something while the other twin's eyes twitched, made them speculate as to whether the twins shared senses.

How could this be possible? Four months after the twins were born, they underwent a CT scan to check for any indications. It was found that they shared brain matter and arterial structures in an interconnected fashion, so there could be no possibility of surgical separation as sometimes occurs in other cases of conjoined twins. Furthermore, it was discovered that both twins shared the same thalamus, which is the brain structure responsible for processing sensory inputs and relaying them to other structures - a communications control room.

(Tatiana, bottom left, and Krista, bottom right, with their mother Felicia, top left.
Image courtesy: Macleans.ca)

The documentary followed the progress of the Hogan twins over the course of a year or so. At around age 2 years and 4 months, the twins weren't able to walk but could stand with support, and had begun to talk using simple expressions like "stop that!" in response to stimulation. Also, it was possible to see the birthing of two distinct personalities.

Tatiana's qualities include being the more "intellectual" of the two (whatever that means for a 2 year old child!), and is very loving, engages in frequent hugging and kissing behaviours, of a happy disposition. By contrast, Krista, who can also be loving and happy, tends to be more hot-tempered, exhibiting protest (crying) behaviours and is more aggressive, will scream to get what she wants and can even be a bit of a "bully" according to Felicia. However, separate personalities though they are, they are already beginning to learn the value of cooperation and they work together on simple tasks such as coordinating movement to stand up and attempt to walk. If you tickle Krista, Tatiana giggles.

Some of the usual medical problems affecting many pairs of conjoined twins also affect the Hogans. Despite being smaller and thinner, Tatiana's heart pumps for both of them and is thus at risk of enlargement and possible failure. Tatiana's heart also works twice as hard to supply the brain's arterial system with blood. Over time, her heart rate has thankfully dropped and is much closer to Krista's, but the possibility of further complications as the twins age always looms.

It was also discovered that when the twins slept, Tatiana would stop breathing for up to 20 seconds. A surgical operation was needed to remove the huge adenoids that were causing the problem, but when Tatiana was anaesthetised it was observed that she was borrowing a large amount of blood to keep her going. The trouble with this was that Krista didn't have enough blood to be anaesthetised herself, which meant she had to be awake (and suffer pain?) when Tatiana went under the knife.

The rest of the documentary focused largely on the Hogan family's meeting with another pair of craniopagus twins, Lori and George Schappell, who are also joined at the head but have separate brains. The Schappells have enjoyed fame to an extent by appearing on a variety of talk shows, television dramas and singing contests, and were able to discuss their situations and give advice for the Hogans in matters of parenting and how to engage the Hogan twins in relationship skills.

At a later date, further tests were carried out to investigate further the possibility of shared senses. They concluded that the "brain of one twin records signals from the other's visual field". The explanation proffered for this told about how images entering the eyes of a twin travel along a "neuron highway" to the other's visual cortex, meaning that one twin can see what the other witnesses. Fascinating.

Virginia Woolf's Last Letter

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:09:00 +0000

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th Century, having produced several novels, short stories, and diaries. A number of traumatic events in her life, such as the death of her parents in her teens and sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brothers, may have contributed to the depression that plagued her throughout her life. Although her literary output remains largely unaffected, she was subject to periodic mood swings and associated illnesses until her suicide at age 59.

In a letter to her husband, regarded as her suicide note, she revealed a glimpse of life as a voice-hearer:

Transcript:

Tuesday.

Dearest,

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

When a Man becomes a Woman

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sun, 16 May 2010 22:17:00 +0000

Interesting article in The Guardian the other day, about how virtual reality (VR) can be used in certian circumstances to change a male's sense of self into that of a woman's, the perceived experience being so powerful that the men reacted quite sharply (i.e. like a woman) to a slap. Patronising as that sounds, the state of mind does remain an interesting feature and it reminded me of a particular religious tradition that urges it's male adherents to emulate a type of female consciousness. Perhaps I may write more on this later, here's the article for now:

Virtual reality used to transfer men's minds into a woman's body

Researchers projected men's sense of self into a virtual reality woman, changing the way they behaved and thought

* Ian Sample
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 22.00 BST

Scientists have transferred men's minds into a virtual woman's body in an experiment that could enlighten the prejudiced and shed light on how humans distinguish themselves from others.

In a study at Barcelona University, men donned a virtual reality (VR) headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. When they looked down they could even see their new body and clothes.

The "body-swapping" effect was so convincing that the men's sense of self was transferred into the virtual woman, causing them to react reflexively to events in the virtual world in which they were immersed.

Men who took part in the experiment reported feeling as though they occupied the woman's body and even gasped and flinched when she was slapped by another character in the virtual world.

"This work opens up another avenue for virtual reality, which is not just to transform your sense of place, but also your sense of self," said Mel Slater, a virtual reality researcher at the Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies and University College London. "There isn't any other technology that allows you to look down and see another body that isn't yours and give you the illusion that it is," he said.

"If you can temporarily give people the illusion that their bodies are different, then the evidence suggests it also affects their behaviour and the way they think. They can have new experiences: a person who is thin can know what it's like to be fat. A man can have an experience of what it's like to be a woman."

In the study, 24 men took turns wearing a VR headset that immersed them in a virtual room. Some men saw the virtual environment through the eyes of a female character who was sitting down, while others had a viewpoint that was just to the side of her.

During the experiment, a second virtual female approached and appeared to rub the person's shoulder or arm. Researchers in the lab mimicked this sensation in the real world for some of the volunteers by rubbing their shoulder or arm, helping to reinforce their feeling of occupying the character's body.

Later in the study, the second character lashed out and slapped the face of the character the men were playing. "Their reaction was immediate," said Slater. "They would take in a quick breath and maybe move their head to one side. Some moved their whole bodies. The more people reported being in the girl's body, the stronger physical reaction they had."

Sensors on the men's bodies showed their heart rates fell sharply for a few seconds and then ramped up – a classic response to a perceived attack.

As expected, the body swapping effect was felt more keenly by men who saw their virtual world through the female character's eyes than those whose viewpoint was slightly to one side of her. In all cases, the feeling was temporary and lasted only as long as the study.

The study, which appears in the online science journal PLoS One, suggests that our minds have a very fluid picture of our bodies. The research is expected to shed light on the thorny neuroscientific puzzle of how our brain tells the difference between a part of our own body, and something else in the wider world.

The work might also improve rehabilitation for patients who have experienced strokes and other medical problems by immersing them in a world that helps them to use their bodies to the full again.

Introducing: Petri Dish Talk

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:39:00 +0000

I was delighted to stumble across a neuroscience blog that I hadn't seen before. Petri Dish Talk is run by Mohammed Rahman, a neurobiology researcher who now works in biotech, and who has also worked with drugs that affect the CNS such as Carbidopa and Divalproex, which are used to treat Parkinson's and Bi-polar disorder respectively.

Among the few posts currently published, Rahman discusses the tension between research and industrialisation in his first offering. He suggests that departmentalising projects will allow errors to slip through the net in spite of well-intentioned lab researchers, and that biotech industries should do more to ensure research and experimental integrity instead of following a business model that tends to be blinkered and short-sighted in regard to such concerns.

After a very brief and informative post on BOLD fMRI that excellently serves as an expanded definition of the term, he launches into a more detailed post about dendritic pruning within the wider issue of neuroplasticity. With decent illustrations, Rahman talks about how Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) is one of the many theories advanced to explain this adaptability of the brain and the mechanism by which the dendrites are pruned. He ends with looking forward to a future in which neuroplasticity will be vigorously studied and what it will have to say about our minds as a physical structure (and rightly so).

In the last two posts we are treated to a double-whammy that explains how meditation can bring about neurophysiological changes, by virtue of a 2007 PNAS paper on the neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-time meditation practitioners, that long-time (focused) experts tend to have specialised attentional networks with a simultaneous decrease in "chatter". In the second part, Rahman discusses a 2008 paper that discusses these changes: larger volumes of grey matter in the hippocampus and frontal cortex. On the face of it,this seems as natural as a professional athlete gaining muscle mass due to exercise, so in the same way an experienced meditator gains greater "strength" in certain neural circuits due to focus and concentration-oriented meditating.

Overall I think this is a good start for a blog and I was impressed with the quality of the information as well as the easily readable presentation. I'll definitely be looking forward to more contributions.

Foot Discovered In Baby Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:10:00 +0000

Ok guys, for the first time I have something that's

NSFW!

Pity that isn't my own work, I'm lazy right now and nicked this via Joanne Manaster and KevinMD.com. Still, you gotta admit this story treads the fine line between Whoa and Pass-Me-That-Buckettttt. The Denver Channel is running a story about a medical first - a foot found growing inside a newborn's brain. I have nothing to add so I'm just gonna post the entire article here. Graphic image ahead, you have been warned:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- A Colorado Springs family is part of one of the strangest cases in medical history.

Dr. Paul Grabb, a pediatric brain surgeon, said he was surprised when he discovered a small foot growing inside the brain of 3-day-old Sam Esquibel. "The foot literally popped out of the brain," Grabb told TheDenverChannel Wednesday.

The appendage threatened the newborn's life.

When Grabb performed the life-saving surgery at Memorial Hospital for Children in Colorado Springs, he was in for another surprise: he also found what appeared to be parts of an intestine in the folds of the infant's tiny brain, in addition to another developing foot, hand and thigh. "I've never seen anything like it before," Grabb told the Colorado Springs Gazette. "It looked like the breach delivery of a baby coming out of the brain."

Sam was delivered on Oct. 1, within hours of an ultrasound that showed what appeared to be a tumor developing in the brain of the fetus. Three days later, Grabb performed the surgery to remove it. The reason for the strange growth was not clear at first. It was thought to be a teratoma -- a congenital brain tumor composed of foreign tissue such as muscle, hair or teeth -- or a fetus in fetu, which is a developmental abnormality in which a fetal twin begins to form within the other.

Grabb, the only pediatric brain surgeon in southern Colorado, said that the formal pathology report identified the mass as a teratoma because of how perfectly formed the structure was but there is a fine line between that and the fetus in fetu. "So it's unclear if a fetal twin began to form within another," Grabb said.

Grabb said he sees a teratoma once every few years but it doesn't compare to Sam's. Teratoma tumors do not usually grow as complex as a foot. "You show those pictures to the most experienced pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, and they've never seen anything like it," Grabb told the Gazette. "This is completely abnormal."

Grabb said neurologically, Sam is expected to do well. Sam's brain tumor can come back so he will be monitoring that in the months and years to come.

Mom Says Baby A Miracle

Sam's mom, Tiffnie, told TheDenverChannel on Wednesday that her son is doing well but that she didn't want to appear on camera because she doesn't want to exploit her child and make him appear like a freak in the eyes of the world.

"This is our baby," Tiffnie explained, in tears.

She said when she first talked to the Gazette, she thought the story would only appear in the small-town paper. But it has circled the globe and she is getting calls from national and international media outlets. "I am so overwhelmed right now ... We've been bombarded with calls," Tiffnie said.

DenverChannel.com Reporter Jane Slater held the infant with the baby blue eyes and round face and said "he is the cutest baby I've ever seen." Sam's at a healthy weight -- as evidenced by his pudgy arms and legs -- which explains why family members call him the "Michelin Man," Slater said.

He was alert and happy, with a barely visible inch-long scar which stretched from his hairline to the top of his cheek. Sam is still recovering from the surgery and shows weakness on one side of his body and some trouble with higher-level eye functions. He is already undergoing rehabilitation.

Tiffnie had said that her pregnancy was easy and there were no signs of complications until the ultrasound on Oct. 1. She and her husband had given up on the idea of having any children after years of trying and then Sam was conceived. Tiffnie said she doesn't mind driving to the hospital every week or month for Sam's MRI and blood checks, considering that he is healthy and happy.

"It's a miracle," she said.

In the meantime, Grabb wonders about the possibilities for medical science. "How does the body form complete extremities? Who is to say we can't grow a heart, leg or foot?" Grabb asked the Denver Post earlier. "This could show a window of what's possible."

"It's always impressive to see these sorts of things but it's not as unsual as you would think," said Dr. Rich Gustafson, with Cherry Creek Pediatrics. "Teratomas can be found in abdomens or other parts of the body ... what made this case so unusual is how perfectly formed the foot was and being in the skull as well. Usually, it's a totally safe and benign tumor. Often, it gets picked up in adulthood but now with ultrasound, you're actually picking more up as they are getting fetal ultrasounds."

700-year-old Brain Found Preserved!

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:19:00 +0000

Evolutionary psychology tends to receive harsh criticism, and often rightly so. One of the main reasons for this is the severe lack of evidence for many of it's proposals given that the paucity of fossilised brains fails to bolster many a case. And it isn't even anyone's fault. That's just the way it goes sometimes, that the brain is a jelly-like substance that is subject to decay after death, and there's no way we can objectively analyse or verify any differences in brains of long ago with brains of today.

This isn't set to change anytime soon, but the remarkable discovery of a medieval child's brain was the subject of a Neuroimage paper published recently. This is extremely exciting on many counts: the brain has been so fantastically preserved that it is possible to identify the frontal, temporal and occipital lobes, and even the sulci and gyri, the grooves and furrows channeled into brains.

However it is only the left-hemisphere that survived and not the entire brain, which had also shrunk to about 80% of it's original weight due to the (natural) mummification process. Although it was first discovered in 1998 and preserved all this time in a formalin solution, it was found in the skull of a 13th Century infant that was exhumed at an archaeological dig in north-west France. The body of the 18-month-old child was wrapped in leather and kept in a wooden coffin with a pillow underneath the head.

The presence of acidic clay soil and fresh briny water around the burial site is believed to have contributed towards the excellent preservation of the brain. To a certain degree, even the innate cellular structure had been preserved, so much so that intact neurons and dendrites - branched fibres that extend from the cell body of a neuron - had survived for observation in the 21st Century. It was also possible to identify grey and white matter. Apart from the external burial conditions, the toughness of the neuronal myelin sheath and collagen fibres are said to be the reasons for why the brain tissue had been nicely preserved.

It cannot be said for sure how the infant died, but the presence of an unhealed circular head fracture may have been the likeliest cause. High levels of hemosiderin suggested that the infant had heavy bleeding for several days prior to death. Poor little mite.
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Papageorgopoulou, C., Rentsch, K., Raghavan, M., Hofmann, M., Colacicco, G., Gallien, V., Bianucci, R., & Rühli, F. (2010). Preservation of cell structures in a medieval infant brain: A paleohistological, paleogenetic, radiological and physico-chemical study NeuroImage, 50 (3), 893-901 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.01.029

What is "Self Transcendence"?

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:58:00 +0000

A recent study by Italian researchers uncovered the fact that neurosurgery involving certain brain structures can effect personality changes that make one feel more "spiritual". 88 patients underwent pre- and post-surgical personality assessments while treated for tumours, and the results were combined with lesion mapping procedures (to precisely locate lesions) after surgery to measure changes in a personality construct called Self-Transcendence (ST). It was found that patients with posterior lesions experienced a considerable increase in 'spirituality' after the surgical removal of their tumours than those with anterior lesions, and that those with more aggressive types of tumour were most likely to describe themselves as religious. For a fuller report and discussion of this fascinating study, please see Mo Costandi's Neurophilosophy.

As I read through various articles detailing this announcement, I became intrigued at the constant mention of ST as a measure of personality. In his paper, Cosimo Urgesi describes ST as reflecting "the enduring tendency to transcend contingent sensorimotor representations and to identify the self as an integral part of the universe as a whole." ST is among several other personality dimensions in the psychobiological Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) that was devised by C. R. Cloninger and colleagues in 1994. The TCI has been used in genetics to show ST as a heritable trait, and in molecular neurosciences to show ST related to the functioning of the serotoninergic system. According to Cloninger et al. (1993) their model followed on from previous research that confirmed four dimensions of temperament; novelty-seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence, and added three more dimensions that mature in adulthood; self-directedness, cooperativeness and self-transcendence.

In their discussion of ST, Cloninger et al. begin with the amusing sentence: "Most people meditate or pray daily, which is more frequent than sexual intercourse according to population surveys". They go on to note the lack of spirituality-related traits from personality inventories including the well-known Five Factor Model, which is odd considering that spirituality is an integral aspect of people's lives and mental activity. In describing their definition of spirituality, they say:

"Self-transcendence refers generally to identification with everything conceived as essential and consequential parts of a unified whole. This involves a state of 'unitive consciousness' in which everything is part of one totality. In unitive consciousness, there is no individual self because there is no meaningful distinction between self and other—the person is simply aware of being an integral part of the evolution of the cosmos. This unitive perspective may be described as acceptance, identification, or spiritual union with nature and its source ... The person may identify (or feel a sense of spiritual union) with anything or everything. They may experience the feeling that they are part of or being guided by a wonderful intelligence, which is possibly the divine source of all phenomena. Ultimately, there may be loss of all distinctions between self and other by identifying with the concept of an immanent God as one-in-all."

So it all sounds rather New-Agey (the paper mentions Buddhism and nirvana, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta), but I was still curious about the actual questions themselves. In formulating questions to measure personality dimensions, care is taken to ensure that they accurately represent the concepts they try to measure. Moreover, statistics such as Cronbach's Alpha are employed to ensure that the measure has a high level of internal consistency; the higher, the better it is at measuring a personality construct. In this context ST consisted of three sub-scales; Self-forgetfulness vs. self-consciousness, transpersonal identification, and spiritual acceptance vs. materialism, all three exhibiting a Cronbach Alpha of above 0.7. This indicates that each of the three sub-scales were reliable in excess of 70% in measuring what they claimed to measure.

PsychMaven kindly helped me aquire a copy of the TCI. Bearing in mind that the "questions" are actually statements that one ought to rate on a 5-point scale (1 = Definitely false, 5 = Definitely true), here is the complete list (in order of appearance) that purport to contribute to the ST dimension of personality:

12. I often feel a strong sense of unity with all the things around me.

25. Often I have unexpected flashes of insight or understanding while relaxing.

29. I sometimes feel so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one living process.

32. I think that most things that are called miracles are just chance.

42. Sometimes I have felt like I was part of something with no limits or boundaries in time and space.

43. I sometimes feel a spiritual connection to other people that I cannot explain in words.

52. Sometimes I have felt my life was being directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being.

56. I have had moments of great joy in which I suddenly had a clear, deep feeling of oneness with all that exists.

68. I often become so fascinated with what I’m doing that I get lost in the moment – like I’m detached from time and place.

73. I often feel a strong spiritual or emotional connection with all the people around me.

91. I have made real personal sacrifices in order to make the world a better place – like trying to prevent war, poverty and injustice.

95. It often seems to other people like I am in another world because I am so completely unaware of things going on around me.

99.I often feel like I am a part of the spiritual force on which all life depends.

106. I have had personal experiences in which I felt in contact with a divine and wonderful spiritual power.

112. Often when I look at an ordinary thing, something wonderful happens – I get the feeling that I am seeing it fresh for the first time.

118. Religious experiences have helped me to understand the real purpose of my life.

143. I believe that all life depends on some spiritual order or power that cannot be completely explained.

148. I often feel so connected to the people around me that it is like there is no separation between us.

151. I am often called “absent-minded” because I get so wrapped up in what I am doing that I lose track of everything else.

157. I often do things to help protect animals and plants from extinction.

175. I have a vivid imagination.

190. I would gladly risk my own life to make the world a better place.

206. I think it is unwise to believe in things that cannot be explained scientifically.

212. Often I become so involved in what I am doing that I forget where I am for a while.

223. I have had experiences that made my role in life so clear to me that I felt very excited and happy.

232. Reports of mystical experiences are probably just wishful thinking.

It could be argued that statements such as these are anything but 'transcendent'. As Costandi eloquently put it in his report, Urgesi et al. fall short in their study of truly defining spirituality because it is likely that different patients will hold different ideas of spirituality and how it affects their lives. Furthermore, spirituality is an area that consists of many ideas apart from 'transcendence' which, by all accounts, is generally taken to refer to a state of being philosophically and affectively 'above and beyond' this world and all forms of mundane issues. Although many items deal with experiencing spiritual connections and having a sense of oneness with the universe, items that attempt to measure patients' attempts to save plants and animals from extinction hardly qualify as being transcendent and neither does gladly risking one's life for any purpose do the same. Having a "vivid imagination", however, is certainly a questionable inclusion which is bound to draw some sarcastic remarks.

We may quibble about the exactness of ST items and whether they accurately measure spirituality, the neurological findings nevertheless support the dependence of religious beliefs on brain function and even further increases evidence that religious beliefs can be experimentally studied. Urgesi et al. even go as far as to say that "dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviours".
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Urgesi, C., Aglioti, S., Skrap, M., & Fabbro, F. (2010). The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence Neuron, 65 (3), 309-319 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.026

Cloninger CR, Svrakic DM, & Przybeck TR (1993). A psychobiological model of temperament and character. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50 (12), 975-90 PMID: 8250684

We've Been Nominated!

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:13:00 +0000

The team at ResearchBlogging.Org and Seed Media Group are honouring the best bloggers who discuss peer-reviewed research in the first Research Blogging Awards. Over 400 nominations were made, and an expert panel of judges have whittled them down to 5-10 blogs per category which are deemed to be the "best of the best".

I feel very honoured to have my blog nominated under the category of Best Blog - Psychology, and would like to thank the judges for this. I would also like to give a very heartfelt thank you to all my readers.

To view a record of my peer-reviewed research posts, please see a list of all my research posts or my user page at ResearchBlogging. Voting is underway as registered bloggers have been sent invitation by ResearchBlogging.Org. If you're not registered (and blog about peer-reviewed research) but would like to vote, register here.

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UPDATE 23 March 2010: The award for Best Blog-Psychology went to Christian Jarrett of the BPS Research Digest. And I wish him a hearty congratulations on the achievement.

Mr. Crowley's Suicide Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:11:00 +0000

Wine is fine,
But whiskey's quicker.
Suicide is slow with liquor.
Take a bottle, drown your sorrows,
THEN IT FLOODS AWAY TOMMORROW!!

So goes the first verse of 'Suicide Solution', an infamous song of Ozzy Osbourne's that deals with the dangers of alcohol abuse, and which was the central feature in two legal cases against him where he was charged with inciting the suicides of heavy metal fans after they listened to the song. In fact, controversy has dogged Osbourne since the beginning of his career with the founding of the influential heavy metal group Black Sabbath, who are credited with having invented the genre. Although Osbourne was found not guilty in those cases, other related matters referred to the issues of including satanic imagery in song lyrics, stage performances and album covers, as well as allegations of surreptitious backmasking of satanic messages in said albums, all things that were said to be bad infuences on young adults. Osbourne has claimed he harbours no satanic beliefs and that the inclusion of such imagery in his musical corpus was purely for reasons of showmanship.

Similarly, the music of Marilyn Manson is said to have contributed to at least one fan's suicide. But more seriously the students who carried out the Columbine High School massacre and the SuccessTech Academy shootings were said to have been heavily influenced by Manson's music. Around 50 churches were also burned down between 1992 and 1996 in Norway, for which many fans of the developing black metal scene claimed responsibility.

It isn't just the fans who are supposedly influenced adversely. Mayhem vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin, better known by his stage name 'Dead', was notorious for mutilating himself on stage with hunting knives and broken glass. Finally in 1991, and almost as a fitting homage to his nom de plume, he sat down among his bandmates and calmly slashed his wrists and neck with small cuts before inserting a shotgun into his mouth and blowing his brains everywhere. Other bandmates were famous for regular conflicts, culminating in the brutal murder of guitarist Øystein Aarseth by bassist Varg Vikernes.

If one looks deeper in the issue, one is sure to find many more horror stories of murders and depressive suicides with the common denominator of metal music. Indeed, one wouldn't be blamed for automatically assuming that individuals attracted to such music may tend to be prone to depression and/or exhibit anti-social behaviour of other kinds. But is there any actual data to substantiate this?

Vaughan Bell of mindhacks.com was kind enough to alert and send me a paper published late last year that attempts to analyse if there is a link between mental health and the enjoyment of such music. The main research questions that the study sought to answer were:

Do metal music fans in France exhibit great levels of anxiety and depression?
What variables mediate the levels of anxiety and depression for metal music fans?

Recours et al. (2009) surveyed 333 French metal fans by administering the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), a simple test that aims to detect, obviously, notable anxiety and depression. Among other things, they analysed differences in gender, age, status, education, motivation and level of participation in metal culture. This included intimate items such as the behaviour of participants at metal concerts and whether they had body modifications such as piercings and tattoos.

Summary of the very interesting results: Out of 333 participants, 282 were male (87.8%) and 39 were female (12.15%), the mean age of which was 22.6 years old. (age range: 13-44 years). Half of them were students, 41.7% of the rest being employed and the remainder being both students and employed. Average years immersed in metal music culture was 9.22 years with average concerts attended per year was 16. Slightly over one-third had a tattoo or piercing while just 5.3 had a combination of both. The most popular subgenres of metal music indulged in were death metal (37.7%), black metal (22.7%) and thrash metal (18%). Motivations for attending concerts included the expectedly high 95.9% to enjoy the music, followed by 84.6% attending for the "ambience". Only 33.9% cited drinking as a reason to attend, and very small percentages of people attended in order to sample drugs (4.98%), sell drugs (2.72%), and to fight (0.91%).

Factor analyses revealed a three-dimensional structure, and an orthagonal rotation was performed to analyse how pertinent the depression and anxiety factors were. These two factors ended up explaining 38.71% of the variance (27.55% = anxiety, 11.17% depression), with reliability factors using Cronbach's Alpha being 0.70 and 0.67 respectively. In plain language, this means that - based on the answers provided - the HADS test was 70% and 67% reliable in detecting anxiety and depression respectively.

All in all, the results showed that the respondents exhibited low levels of anxiety and depression. The HADS instrument can be used to determine an arbitrary cutoff point as there is no generally accepted cutoff. The creators of the instrument, Zigmond & Snaith (1994), recommended a cutoff of 7/8 for possible and 10/11 for probable anxiety or depression. Following previous research Recours et al. chose 11 as a cutoff score for each dimension of anxiety and depression, implying that respondents exhibiting a score greater than 11 would be considered to have a serious level of anxiety or depression. The results found the average scores to be 7.26 and 3.76 for anxiety and depression respectively, far below the chosen cutoff levels. However, as in all populations there were some individuals scoring above the cutoff (15.6% anxiety, 3.4% depression) but these cannot be said to be due to the influence of metal music.

Multiple regression analyses revealed that none of the other variables (age, gender, concert attendance, etc.) had a link to mental health in terms of either anxiety or depression, but surprisingly the same analyses revealed a relationship between mental health and writing song lyrics, drinking at concerts, and having scarifications. Also, links were revealed between mental health, education level and employment status. However, these relationships were still nowhere near the 'danger' cutoff point of 11.

In conclusion, the authors discuss the huge gender bias towards males among other things, and suggest it as being 'very' representative of the culture of metal music. Maybe so, but let's get to discussing the drawbacks of this study:

The study was carried out over the Internet. The HADS instrument is effectively a questionnaire that was administered over a non-personal medium, but even with personal contact there is no way to certify the replies as genuine. In this way Internet-administered tests contain an extra layer of uncertainty. The authors state that they considered 'personal' measures such as approaching "morbidly dressed" metal fans on the street, but this would isolate metal fans who do not attire themselves in such an "obvious" way. But at least they entered 10 different Internet forums dedicated to metal music in order to have a realistic possibility of contacting individuals with an almost certain interest in metal music and culture. However, another category of isolation occurs here as genuinely depressed people are least likely to complete a questionnaire.

Also, by the authors' admission, France happens to be a country where the growth of cults are strictly controlled, and where "French officials are particularly concerned about Satanic cults related to metal music". Apparently a Govt. ministry has warned parents to limit their children's exposure to metal music and also to monitor their access to metal-oriented websites. Could it be possible that the majority of the French metaller population aren't exposed to the most extreme of metal subgenres? After all, throughout the entire paper scant mention is made of any specific group and metal music is referred to in categorical format; black, death, and thrash. Passing mentions are made of Slayer, Black Sabbath, Megadeth and Metallica, bands that have a certain notoriety but are also decidedly mainstream. Aren't French teenagers aware of bands like Arch Enemy, Goatwhore, Amon Amarth, Dimmu Borgir, Extol, Kult ov Azazel, and others? These are things to consider.

It was also interesting to observe how the results pointed to an unnoted third factor before orthogonal rotation enabled relevance to the anxiety and depression factors. So I agree with the authors that further research needs to be undertaken in order to determine which factor(s) can aptly describe the 61.3% of the variance that wasn't accounted for by anxiety and depression.

In closing, the authors offer reasons for why the general conclusions point to lower levels of anxiety and depression among metal lovers. It is proposed that the predominant themes of satanism, gloom and death give airing to subjects infrequently discussed in society and which are treated in a somewhat taboo manner. Although metal music is classed as entertainment in contrast to real images of death, it presents such themes as "typical occurrences that are not outside the norm" and I interpret that as a desensitising factor of sorts. So metal music lovers who frequently indulge in this pastime are more often exposed to morbid themes that have the effect of eventually desensitising them and enabling them to treat it more of the entertainment that it is supposed to be.

But then, what of all the horror stories referred to earlier? What about Dead's suicide? What about the terrible Marilyn Manson-inspired school shootings? Ozzy Osbourne's "satanism"? A tentative proposal is that metal music has a malevolent effect on individuals with certain vulnerabilities, and this is precisely why further research is needed in order to uncover these details. It is for this reason that I do not heartily share the confident assertions of the authors that their "representative" sample (from one country!) indicates low levels of anxiety and depression among metal lovers. Typical quote:

"The results indicate that fans of metal music are in good health with respect to anxiety and depression ... [and] indicate that, contrary to critics who suggest that images of death and destruction in metal music have harmful consequences, the mental health of fans of this type of music is generally good."

Hmmm, when they put it that way it's hard not to agree, but only tentatively. A more accurate representation of this study is that it simply provides an indicative snapshot rather than a comprehensive description.

Speaking of which, it's been ages since I've been to a Motörhead concert...

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Recours, R., Aussaguel, F., & Trujillo, N. (2009). Metal Music and Mental Health in France Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 33 (3), 473-488 DOI: 10.1007/s11013-009-9138-2

Snaith, R. Philip, and Anthony S. Zigmond (1994). HADS: Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Windsor: NFER Nelson.

Junkie On The Phone

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:42:00 +0000

Kirsten Emott is an MD from British Columbia who also writes poetry. The March 2010 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry has published a poem of hers that was originally printed in The Naked Physician: Poems About the Lives of Patients and Doctors by R. Charach.

Junkie On The Phone

You don’t have a headache.

The GP you named doesn’t know you.

The pharmacist recognizes your name.

You even called me before.

I won’t prescribe the drugs.

Play the game elsewhere.

Call up some other doctor.

Set out your lies:

"Doctor, here is my lie.

I want you to join me in my lying.

Pretend I am sick.

Give me what will make me sicker.

Give me a stick

with which to beat myself.

Help me to die."

[VIDEO] Kid Loses Half His Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:27:00 +0000

In consonance with the last posting, I came across this segment of an American kid who lost half his brain/skull in a shooting incident:

Thugs left man with half a head

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:04:00 +0000

I don't often read tabloids, but I noticed this intriguing report in The Sun lately:

Thugs left man with half a head

By STAFF REPORTER

Published: 11 Sep 2009

VICIOUS thugs who punched this man so hard he was left with HALF A HEAD have got off scot free.

Horrified Steve Gator had to have the front of his skull removed by stunned surgeons after his head was smashed against a pavement in the sickening attack. And now the 26-year-old has been told that the teen attackers who disfigured him will escape justice after his case was dropped.

Steve, of Romford, Essex, was attacked after confronting one of the yobs who had been taunting him about his cousin. Another of the violent louts hit him so hard that he was sent flying and struck his head on the path. Steve plunged into a coma for two weeks as his shattered mum and distraught family kept a bedside vigil at Queen's Hospital, Romford.

His brain quickly began swelling and surgeons were forced to remove the front half of his skull just hours after he was admitted.

Grief-stricken mum Nina Gator was warned her son had just a terrifying 15 per cent chance of survival. Two days later cops charged a pair of teenage boys with the savage attack which shocked the neighbourhood. Steve, who has had to quit his job, was left seriously brain damaged and now suffers frequent seizures, has difficulty talking, and his memory is seriously impaired. Mrs Gator, who is his main carer, last night blasted the shock move. The 47-year-old said: "I can't believe it. Everyone is entitled to their day in court."

CPS lawyers claim they needed more proof before going ahead with the case. But Mrs Gator stormed: "Our boy is walking around with half a head - what more evidence do they need? "His sparkle is totally gone. He used to be so independent but he can't work any more and he can't drive." She added: "He's got half a head and he's completely lost his confidence. There's absolutely nothing protecting his brain now it's just under his skin."

Just from looking at the picture, it seems obvious that with this traumatic brain injury (TBI) his frontal lobes are practically destroyed and quite possibly the front parts of his midbrain. The frontal lobe is an extremely important structure responsible for a variety of functions. It is the 'Command HQ' for emotions, and controls and regulates functions such as memory, language, movement, and problem-solving. It is also responsible for more subtle things like judgment, planning, reasoning, spontaneity or impulse control, and some effects on social and sexual behaviour. As such, the frontal lobe administrates much of our very personality and sense of identity. It is also the largest 'lobe' structure, meaning that there is more of it to carry a greater risk of damage. As the story mentions, Gator's "sparkle is totally gone". It is tempting to draw parallels with the tale of Phineas Gage, another individual dubiously famed for frontal lobe damage.

A friend, The Neurocritic, pointed out that Gator may need several cranioplasties in order to rebuild his skull, and highlighted a recent Neurosurgical Focus literature review that discusses the types of post-operative complications associated with the surgical procesure underwent by Gator. Known as a decompressive craniectomy, and consisting of a partial removal of the skull in order to allow the swelling brain to expand without being squeezed, we start with contusion blossoming; the surgery leaves massive bruises which can be observed via pre-op and post-op CT scans.

Lesions - a mass lesion may develop on the opposite side of the brain to the injury or elsewhere in the brain. As Gator's frontal lobes were destroyed, it is possible that a lesion may develop around the back end and possibly affect the parietal lobes, which deals generally with perception, orientation and recognition.

Herniation - a small protrusion (or more) of neural tissue may remain in the early period after swelling subsides, sometimes through the cranial defect as is observed with 'normal' skin hernias. Gator has no such defect though, as the front of the skull was smashed.

Subdural Effusions - a collection of pus beneath the outer lining of the brain. This condition usually results from bacterial meningitis, but because craniectomies affect the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) it is possible that buildups may accumulate. Similar to blood clots. Hygromas may also occur, which are buildups of CSF without blood. To counteract these, a craniectomy should be accompanied with a duraplasty, a reconstructive operation on the dura mater, the outermost and fibrous membrance covering the brain and spinal cord. Duraplasties have been observed to lower the incidence of subdural effusions occurring.

Infection - this may seem a rather obvious effect of any medical procedure, to guard against, but craniectomies (bone removal) will necessitate cranioplasties (bone reconstruction). As such, opening old scars and exposing the brain upto or after a month after the incident runs the risk of contracting infection and delaying healing. The review suggests a minimum wait of 3 months before replacing the bone, and that storage of the bone in a freezer can also increase the risk of infection.

Hydrocephalus - "water on the brain", refers to accumulations of CSF in neural cavities. This is unfortunately a common occurrence beyond a month after the injury, and will need specialised procedures (shunt treatment) to deal with it if it occurs.

Syndrome of the Trephined - another unfortunate common occurrence after decompressive craniectomies, of which common symptoms include dizziness, headaches, concentration difficulties, mood disturbances, irritability, and memory problems. Because Gator's particular situation involved the destruction of his frontal lobes, he will unfortunately suffer much worse symptoms than these. However, in general terms when the motor functions are affected, this then becomes known as motor trephine syndrome.

Bone resorption - when one undergoes a decompressive craniectomy, you're likely to have stray bone fragments swimming around and there's around a 50% chance that bone resorption will occur, which is when bone cells (known as osteoclasts) break down the bone and release minerals like calcium directly into the blood.

Persistent vegetative state - clearly the saddest effect of all extreme brain injuries. While decompressive craniectomies are effective at ameliorating intra-cranial pressure and reducing the risk of death, they offer no guarantee of restoring brain function once the patient suffers a TBI. The risks of surviving into a vegetative or minimally conscious state after undergoing craniectomy range upwards of 15-20%.

It may be that Steve Gator's clinicians need to be vigilant and ensure that his treatment is as risk-free as possible. And of course, wishing him all the best to recover well.
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Stiver, S. (2009). Complications of decompressive craniectomy for traumatic brain injury Neurosurgical FOCUS, 26 (6) DOI: 10.3171/2009.4.FOCUS0965

Ain't Taking This Lying Down..!

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Apologies for the lack of activity in recent months, I have been absorbed in a number of promising projects as well as taking a much-needed vacation.

An interesting report in New Scientist magazine suggests that insults are handled better when lying down rather than sitting or standing up. According to the article, University students who were insulted while seated exhibited neural activity consonant with "approach motivation", which describes to desire to approach and explore. This activity appeared absent in a control group insulted while lying down. Eddie Harmon-Jones, a cognitive scientist at Texas A&M University, interprets this as suggesting that one might be more inclined to attack if one were in the upright state, whereas while lying down we may be more inclined to brood.

At first glance this seems a little odd to me. Brooding is quite different to receiving insults and possibly reacting to them. Brooding means a certain amount of thinking and contemplation is occurring. It isn't the done thing to offer or accept anecdotal evidence as important fact, but from personal experience I've sometimes become more enraged over an incident by brooding about it (while lying down) than I have reacted to insults while sitting or standing upright. Would that mean my reactions contradict this research? The real value of psychological research lies in the ability to translate insights and findings into our lives and observe how relevant or useful they are, and I also have to consider these things personally. I downloaded and read the paper for this experiment; technically it is not an actual paper but a 'short report', a brief description of the subject and experimental method followed by conclusions. A mini-paper. Here's an extract:

"Body movements affect emotional processes. For example, adopting the facial expressions of specific emotions (even via unobtrusive manipulations) affects emotional judgments and memories (Laird, 2007). Manipulated body postures can affect behavior: slumped postures lead to more ‘‘helpless behaviors’’ (Riskind & Gotay, 1982). Simple body postures may also affect other emotive responses and the neural activations associated with them."

That's from the very first paragraph, and to me it seems to get more unreal every time I think about it. I don't dispute that body postures can affect neural activation (anything can affect neural activation, that's kind of what the brain does in the first place, reacting and responding to stimuli) but it seems overstated a bit much. The link between body posture and affectability on emotional reaction looks tenuous when compared with something as fundamental as the availability of oxygen and the human requirement to inhale it to live. But let's take a look at the study: 23 females and 23 males (n = 46) were randomly assigned to write a polemical essay featuring their views on a hot topic (e.g. smoking in public, abortion, etc.) and were told assessment would be carried out by another participant. After attaching EEG sensors, participants were randomly assigned to the upright or lying positions on a reclining chair while hearing themselves being rated on six characteristics including intelligence (1 = unintelligent, 9 = intelligent). Needless to say, participants heard negative reviews of themselves and fumed.

To be more specific, all 'reclined' participants heard negative reviews of themselves while only half 'uprights' heard negative. The other half heard slightly positive reviews. It's good to add a little variety to these things to account for different causes and effects, but I think the total sample size here was too small. Gender effects were accounted for too; males and females were randomly assigned to the two conditions, and male participants heard male-voiced feedback with females hearing female-voiced feedback. For future research, switching gender-voice feedback would make an interesting manipulation.

The results showed that for those in the upright position, the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) was substantially activated more than those who were reclining. Even though both sets of participants expressed similar levels of anger in response to the negative feedback, the left PFC has been linked to anger and approach motivation. This suggests a marked reduction in approach motivation when lying down.

What this means in reality remains under question: Does body posture really affect emotional reactions that much? Similar levels of anger existed between both groups, but those who were lying down appeared less inclined to do something about it? How might those students have reacted with the absence of inhibitory factors? I know that this is preliminary research but these are just some of the questions that need to be researched and accounted for.

Why? Because although some people may consider a study like this to be "fluff psychology" and a little boring, clinicians need to take these types of things a little more seriously when you consider that a large proportion of serious neuroscience is carried out with reclining participants in fMRI-scanners. So I agree with the conclusion of Harmon-Jones' paper; that research is required to help evaluate neuroimaging techniques requiring supine positions. There may not be much to it, but it's worth an exploration.
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Harmon-Jones, E., & Peterson, C. (2009). Supine Body Position Reduces Neural Response to Anger Evocation Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02416.x

If You Had Half a Brain..

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:28:00 +0000

A great story made its way onto the interwebz lately. The Daily Mail reports:

"A 10-year-old girl born with half a brain has both fields of vision in one eye, scientists said today. The youngster, from Germany, has the power of both a right and left eye in the single organ in the only known case of its kind in the world.

"University of Glasgow researchers used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to reveal how the girl’s brain had rewired itself in order to process information from the right and left visual fields in spite of her not having a whole brain."

BBC News goes further with:

"In the case of the German girl, her left and right field vision is almost perfect in one eye. Scans on the girl showed that the retinal nerve fibres carrying visual information from the back of the eye which should have gone to the right hemisphere of the brain diverted to the left ... 'Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent.'"

Get that? The only known case in the world where brain plasticity (the ability of the brain to reorganise itself after injury) is displayed for all to see. Plasticity doesn't always work this way, there are many cases where plasticity effects haven't achieved the mark of restoring all or most of the impaired brain function. Epilepsy patients, for example, who undergo a hemispherectomy (removal of a half of a brain) in order to prevent the onset of severe seizures, among other things tend to lose an entire field of vision in both eyes; they only see people and objects in one half of their visual field, as in the illustration below:

Neither was this a case of brain injury; the anonymous girl (known only as 'AH') failed to adequately develop her cerebral right hemisphere in the womb. As a result, she is without a right-brain and also without the use of her right eye. She also has a slight left-hemiparesis (weakness affecting half of the body) but close to normal vision in both hemifields of her normal left eye.

In a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by Lars Muckli of the University of Glasgow used fMRI to investigate how the visual cortex had remapped itself. In a healthy individual, the cerebral cortex contains "maps" for vision, sound, motion and touch, which develop and modify over time dependent on several factors including genetic cues and neural activity. In the mammalian brain (that is, human brain) the visual cortex is made up of distinct sections dealing with vision, the main one being an area known simply as 'V1', the primary visual cortex. 'V2' deals with quarterfield representations in the area of vision, effectively dealing with the 'up' and 'down' areas of both the right and left hemispheres of vision, while 'V3' is a structure in front of V2 that, among other things, performs a supporting role for V2. There is also the question of retinotopic maps, a direct mapping of the spatial arrangement of the retina, located in visual structures including the cortex and thalamus.

As per materials provided by the University of Glasgow, "visual information is gathered by the retina at the back of the eye and images are inverted when they pass through the lens of the pupil so that images in your left field of vision are received on the right side of the retina, and images from the right are received on the left." The part of the retina close to the nose is known as the nasal retina whereas the other part is referred to as the temporal retina, being in proximity to the temples. Both halves transmit received information through separate nerve fibres. In a normal situation, the nerve fibres of the nasal retina cross over in the optic chiasm, a brain structure located at the bottom of the brain near the hypothalamus, and are processed by the hemisphere on the opposite side. The nerve fibres of the temporal retina remain in the same hemisphere (ipsilateral), meaning that the left and right visual fields described earlier are processed by opposite sides of the brain.

[DIGRESSION]Vision is not the only modality to be processed in this strange way. It actually reflects the larger processing activities of the intact brain which tends to process all other modalities in opposite sides of the brain. To wit, touch and hearing for example that is "entered" into the right side of the body (right body, right ear) are processed by the left-brain, and touch/hearing entered into the left body/ear is processed by the right-brain. This is generally referred to as contralateral processing, when input is processed by the 'opposite' half of the brain. Those inputs processed by the 'same' side of the brain is known as ipsilateral processing. For more information, please read about Basic Visual Pathways.[/DIGRESSION]

The MRI scan displays the complete lack of a right-hemisphere: The optic chiasm is shown here (top l-r) in the transverse and enlarged transverse planes, and (bottom l-r) in the coronal and saggital planes. A rudimentary optic nerve is pointed out in the enlargement by the green arrow but with no discernible optic tract, and it can also be seen how the left-hemisphere is spilling over into the right-domain. The vacant right-hemisphere is filled with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).

In AH's fascinating case, it was found that the nasal retinal nerve had connected to her left-brain. A possible interpretation for AH's condition is suggested by the authors: The lack of a right-brain prevented an opposite connection from being made, which led the optic nerve fibers to "connect" with ipsilateral structures instead.

Remembering that normal cases require a crossing in the optic chiasm, and AH's connections were essentially ipsilateral, how exactly does AH see both visual fields with only one eye? After all, if the entire right hemisphere is missing, AH should see only the left hemifield. The answer lies with the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN), a structure that is embedded deep in the thalamus and which processes visual information from the retina. In AH, both the nasal and temporal retina would need to be mapped onto the LGN to allow for the processing of both hemifields. Again a similar suggestion of ipsilateral projections were presented as being the solution, instead of the usual contralateral connections, and that a mirror-symmetric representation of the hemifields would be received and processed by the thalamus. Similar cases have been seen in achiasmatic dogs where optic nerve fibres terminated in the ipsilateral LGN.

'Islands' were also found to have formed in the left-hemisphere to deal especially with processing of the left hemifield, to compensate for the missing right-brain activity.

The loss of AH's right-hemisphere was discovered at age 3 when she was treated for brief seizures and twitching taking place on her left side. It is speculated that the right-brain failed to develop between Day 28 and Day 49 of embryonic development. Despite the situation, she is able to engage quite capably in activities that require a fair amount of balance, such as riding a bicycle or roller-skating. Truly an extraordinary case in more ways than one.

For a professional view, please see Dr. Steven Novella's entry on this case.
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Muckli, L., Naumer, M., & Singer, W. (2009). Bilateral visual field maps in a patient with only one hemisphere Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809688106

Image: CT Brain Art

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:59:00 +0000

New Scientist magazine currently has a gallery up featuring beautiful art made from real live CT scans of different body parts. Radiologist Kai-hung Fung digitally manipulates images of CT scans so as to make them look more appealing. One of his shots featuring the inside of the nose won the 2007 International Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge.

Here is a shot featuring the brain:

It is a view of the brain from above it. One can see the complex network of arteries and veins (dark blue) and the base of the skull is shown in green.