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Де Кирико и мигренаВторник, 2-ри юни 2009 г. Mind Hacks има в парче хартия "мигрена аура като творческо вдъхновение", публикувано в British Medical Journal през 1988. Докладът разглежда scotomata опит от де Кирико, които може да са в резултат на мигрена; Всички наведнъж, от дясната ми страна, от другата страна на улицата, видях на първия балкон етаж от къща голям черен покров лети във вятъра. Това беше като светкавица от тъмнината в ярка светлина, която наводни всичко. Усетих внезапна мъка и ужасно предчувствие. Това, от дневника на де Кирико, възникнали в деня на смъртта на баща му. Медицинско списание отбелязва, че "предчувствие, че започна атаката се среща често при мигрена". В полу автобиографичния роман "Hebdomeros" де Кирико пише Възхитителни панделки, пламъците, без топлина, тласкани напред като жадни езици, смущаващи мехурчета, линии, изготвени с "maestria", помисли си той отдавна са забравени, нежни вълни, упорит и isochronus, се мести непрекъснато нагоре и нагоре към тавана на спалнята си. Всичко отиде в тирбушон формация, или пък в редовни зигзаг, или пък в строго перпендикулярна мода, наподобяваща щуки, пренасяни от дисциплинирани войски ... Hebdomeros, подсилени с много опит, си представял, че духовната треска, която го е, в този момент, ще продължи не повече от която и да е от предходните. Тъй като той предположи, всичко това ще се случи отново с него, той се бавеше късно тази вечер и мисълта си отиде извън рамките на допустимите граници. Статията е илюстрирана с някои от снимки де Кирико и сравнения с картини на хора, които са били умишлено се опитва да направи своята аура мигрена. Има и малка бележка под линия за Чарлз Dogson, известен още като Луис Карол, който е известно, че страдате от мигрена, и се надяваше да използва своите migrainous нарушения на тялото си като вдъхновение за "Приключенията на Алиса в страната на чудесата".
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Archive for the ‘Psychology & Neuroscience’ Category Memories are made of this (protein);Friday, June 19th, 2009 This, apparently, is the first image of memories “being made”. The bulbs in the synaptic strings are new proteins created when new memories are formed; Research (into what happens on a molecular level when memories are formed) has focused on synapses, which are the main site of exchange and storage in the brain. They form a vast but also constantly fluctuating network of connections whose ability to change and adapt, called synaptic plasticity, may be the fundamental basis of learning and memory. But, if this network is constantly changing, the question is how do memories stay put, how are they formed? It has been known for some time that an important step in long-term memory formation is “translation”, or the production, of new proteins locally at the synapse, strengthening the synaptic connection in the reinforcement of a memory, which until now has never been imaged. Seems like a pretty good excuse to quote Nietzsche; “”I,” you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith- your body and its great reason: that does not say “I,” but does “I.”" Trance statesWednesday, June 17th, 2009 Mind Hacks has an interesting post giving links to videos and articles about trance states in various cultures; Trance is usually described as involving ‘dissociation’ – originally defined by the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet as the ‘unconscious compartmentalisation of normally integrated mental functions’. Dissociation is thought to underlie a wide range of phenomena, including hypnosis, reaction to trauma, trance and some forms of spirit possession, hysteria, conversion disorder and, more controversially, multiple personality disorder. One of the best guides to the range of experiences and the possible neuroscience behind these states is an excellent article by anthropologists Rebecca Seligman and Laurence Kirmayer. One notable omission from the list on Neuroanthropology is video of the female possession rituals of the Zar Cult from Northern Sudan which has been quite widely discussed in the anthropology literature. There’s some brief footage of it online and in another video anthropologist Gerasimos Makris discusses the structure and social meaning of the possession rituals. De Chirico and migrainesTuesday, June 2nd, 2009 Mind Hacks has a piece referencing a paper “Migraine aura as artistic inspiration” published in The British Medical Journal in 1988. The paper looks at scotomata experienced by de Chirico, which may have been the result of migraines; All at once, on my right, on the other side of the street, I saw on the first floor balcony of a house a great black pall flying in the wind. It was like a flash of darkness in the bright light that flooded everything. I felt a sudden anguish and terrible presentiment. This, from de Chirico’s journal, occured on the day of his father’s death. The medical journal notes “the premonition that began the attack is commonly found in migraine”. In his semi autobiographical novel “Hebdomeros” de Chirico writes; Delightful ribbons, flames without warmth, thrust forward like thirsty tongues, disturbing bubbles, lines drawn with “maestria”, which he thought had long been forgotten, delicate waves, obstinate and isochronus, moved continuously up and up towards his bedroom ceiling. It all went away in a corkscrew formation, or else in regular zigzags, or else in strictly perpendicular fashion resembling pikes carried by a disciplined troop… Hebdomeros, fortified by many experiences, imagined that the spiritual fever which had laid him low at this moment would last no longer than any of the preceding ones. Since he supposed all this would happen to him again, he lingered late that evening and his thought went beyond the permitted limits. The article is illustrated with some of de Chirico’s pictures and comparisons with pictures by people who were deliberately trying to draw their migraine aura. There’s also a little footnote about Charles Dogson, aka Lewis Carroll, who was known to suffer from migraines and thought to have used his migrainous disturbances of body image as inspiration for “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Neuropeptide YWednesday, May 27th, 2009 I was flicking through an old Newsweek yesterday and came across a great article “Lessons In Survival”, about research being done on soldiers in massively stressful situations. Certain soldiers go through “stress inoculation” at Fort Bragg, where they go through tests such as being thrown in a swimming pool, hands and feet tied, with a rubber strap between their teeth. The only way to survive is to sink to the bottom, kick off and take a breath when you break the surface. Struggling makes things much worse, and the amount of oxygen that it’s possible to take in isn’t enough anyway, so soldiers will pass out and sink to the bottom. When they do they are pulled out by a diver, revived and asked if they want to quit. If they don’t quit they get thrown back in after a 30 second break. The research shows that soldiers who release large amounts of neuropeptide Y in their brains (the special forces soldiers) cope far better than those that don’t. The amino acid, a natural tranquilizer, that regulates blood pressure, appetite, learning and memory is released in much higher quantities in those with a metronomic heartbeat- with almost no variation between beats. To the point that the researcher quickly became skilled in predicting which soldiers would pass the program, simply by measuring their heartbeats. Ironically the metronomic heartbeat is usually associated with early heart disease and even sudden death. I found other articles linking neuropeptide Y to severe alcohol dependence and obesity. Not surprisingly people who don’t produce much of it are far more likely to have problems with addiction. So in a sense the central problem is their physiological ability to cope with stress. It might be interesting to do a study that looks at this in relation to, say, video game use or media use. Maybe someone’s already done it? I’m going to look around for that… UPDATE: I was just doing a little more research on this and found another excellent aricle about research from the same scientist, this time in The New Scientist, called “How Brain Chemicals Can Help Soldiers Keep Their Heads”. It talks about the extreme effects experienced by trainees at the Fort Bragg SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) course; At its worst, the fog of war can involve a disengagement from reality. Morgan’s team has found that almost all SERE trainees experience some degree of “dissociation” – perceptual distortions in which time can appear to speed up or slow down, colours or smells can seem unusually intense, or the sense of self can shift. In extreme cases, troops report out-of-body experiences. The research team found that in the elite performers, there was also elevated production of a “super hormone” dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA. Charles Morgan, the psychiatrist in charge of the research, wants to experiment with giving soldiers both DHEA and NPY to improve their performance in battle and to prevent post traumatic stress disorder; Soldiers with the highest levels of NPY also experience milder symptoms of dissociation during SERE training (Biological Psychiatry, vol 47, p 902). That could have important implications for troops’ long-term mental health, since studies have found that sufferers of PTSD report greater levels of dissociation during combat than those who experienced similar trauma but did not develop the condition. The most intriguing implication of Morgan’s research, however, is the suggestion that supplementing levels of DHEA or NPY could enhance soldiers’ ability to think straight in the heat of battle – and perhaps also offer some protection against PTSD. The Neuroscience of PornSunday, May 17th, 2009 A few years ago the German lab Neuroimage released the results of a study looking at what happened in the minds of people who were shown porn images, whilst in an fMRI machine. The study found that; “the ventral premotor cortex which is a key structure for imitative (mirror neurons) and tool-related (canonical neurons) actions showed a bilateral sexual preference-specific activation, suggesting that viewing sexually aroused genitals of the preferred sex triggers action representations of sexual behavior.” In other words, looking at still pictures of naked people triggered our mirror neurons into action, as the brain began pretending that it was actually having sex, and not just looking at smutty pictures in a science lab. Porn, it seems, doesn’t cause us to think about sex. From a purely neurological point of view, the arousal of the viewer isn’t preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the screen. Rather, the act is the idea. Porn works by triggering us to imagine that we’re having sex; the sex we’re having is the sex on the screen. Choice BlindnessWednesday, April 22nd, 2009 “Could we be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of our skills as experts of ourselves?” is the question at the beginning of an excellent New Scientist article that looks at “Choice Blindness”; We have been trying to answer this question using techniques from magic performances. Rather than playing tricks with alternatives presented to participants, we surreptitiously altered the outcomes of their choices, and recorded how they react. For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices. Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they did not choose. Common sense dictates that all of us would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 per cent of the trials our participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering “reasons” for their “choice”. The authors go on to speculate that confabulation (the story telling we do to justify things after the fact) may play a role in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Depending on what our volunteers say in response to the mismatched outcomes of choices (whether they give short or long explanations, give numerical rating or labelling, and so on) we found this interaction could change their future preferences to the extent that they come to prefer the previously rejected alternative. This gives us a rare glimpse into the complicated dynamics of self-feedback (“I chose this, I publicly said so, therefore I must like it”), which we suspect lies behind the formation of many everyday preferences. Quantum BiologySaturday, March 14th, 2009 Olfactory bulb of an adult mouse © Dr Adam Puche The story of Schrödinger’s cat was invented to illustrate the inherent paradox of entanglement, using the simultaneous life and death of a familiar domestic animal to ram home the absurdity of the concept. For me, the device is lame compared to the story of an actual experiment such as the classic Double-slit experiment. The dual nature of energy and of matter naturally evokes many questions about reality and about life and the workings of consciousness. I remember reading a story in the excellent Faber Book of Science, years ago, about worms that live in the tideline and come out of the sand onto the beach, to photosynthesize, at low tide. They are, apparently, the only creature that’s part animal, part plant, since they have photosynthesizing cells in their skin. The pay-off of the story is that when scientists took them out of the beach and put them in a lab under a constant light-source, they continued to follow the tide times. Which led the scientists to suspect that they may be responding to the gravitational force of the moon. High level physics and biology seemed to merge even in the simplest of creatures. Discover magazine has an interesting article about the relatively new field of Quantum Biology- slightly ridiculously titled “Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?” The title, incidentally, made me think of Major General Albert Stubblebine, commanding general of the United States Army Intelligence Security Command from 1981 to 1984. Who may have been under the influence of Quantum Mechanics when he tried repeatedly to walk through the wall of his office, in his bid to create super-soldiers using parapsychology and pseudo-science. Objects do pass through other objects in quantum mechanics, although Brian Greene, in his book “The Elegant Universe”, estimates that to have a good chance of walking through a wall, it would be necessary to try it every second for approximately the current age of the universe. Anyway, the article reveals that new tools such as femtosecond lasers and nanoscale precision positioning are opening up biological processes to quantum-scale observation. The incredible efficiency of photosynthesis, the sense of smell, consciousness and even the beneficial effects of green tea, are all variously thought to arise from quantum processes; “…many human experiences… from dreams to subconscious emotions to fuzzy memory, seem closer to the Alice in Wonderland rules governing the quantum world than to the cut-and-dried reality that classical physics suggests. Discovering a quantum portal within every neuron in your head might be the ultimate trip through the looking glass…” Dualism and GodThursday, March 5th, 2009 Arts and letters Daily has a link to an interesting New Scientist article (click on SKIP, lower right corner of subscribe box), about how our brains are predisposed to religious or creative thinking. The article centers around research by Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale; So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things – things with minds, or at least volition – and inanimate objects. This separation happens very early in life. Bloom and colleagues have shown that babies as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people. Shown a box moving in a stop-start way, babies show surprise. But a person moving in the same way elicits no surprise. To babies, objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose. Bloom says the two systems are autonomous, leaving us with two viewpoints on the world: one that deals with minds, and one that handles physical aspects of the world. He calls this innate assumption that mind and matter are distinct “common-sense dualism”. The body is for physical processes, like eating and moving, while the mind carries our consciousness in a separate – and separable – package. “We very naturally accept you can leave your body in a dream, or in astral projection or some sort of magic,” Bloom says. “These are universal views.” There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners. As Barrett points out, this is an evolutionarily useful skill. Without it we would be unable to maintain large social hierarchies and alliances or anticipate what an unseen enemy might be planning. “Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability,” he says. You have to admire these scientists- I’ve never seen a baby that doesn’t look surprised. The article goes on to talk about the other essential ingredient in the construction of religion; an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect. There’s reference to an extremely interesting experiment published late last year; Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation. The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. “We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is,” Whitson says. What’s going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking. That would explain why religions enjoy a revival during hard times. Edge- Art and Human RealityFriday, February 27th, 2009 A few weeks ago there were quite a few articles floating around about Dennis Dutton’s book “The Art Instinct; Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution”. At the time I couldn’t find anything really good on it, but Edge has a great talk with him; a video interview and transcript. My favorite quote from it; We have to consider the spontaneity of the arts—the way they spontaneously arise, beginning in childhood experience, across the globe. Think of the ways in which children, by the time they’re three years old, can engage in make-believe and keep imaginary worlds separate from one another. A small child playing with its teddy bears at a tea party. If you knock over a cup and spill the pretend tea in it, the child will not be in the least confused as to which of the three empty cups to refill. In fact, if you refill the wrong empty cup, and insist it was the one that spilled, the child may well break out in tears. The child then goes from the tea party over to the television, and watches a Bugs Bunny cartoon, or “Sesame Street.” From there, it’s on to reading a book, entering into its make-believe world, and then to have dinner with mommy and daddy. Even a three year old can keep all of these real and fictional worlds coherently separate from each other. Such spontaneous intellectual sophistication—try to imagine teaching it from scratch to a three year old—is a mark of an evolved adaptation.