The New York Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It’s all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely conducive to acts of creation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, couldn’t write when she was experiencing one of her “episodes”: the onset of depression was “like a death,” she wrote. Nevertheless, as Woolf’s journals make clear, her writing was still profoundly influenced by her mental illness. Here is I how describe Woolf in my book:

Woolf’s writing style was deeply rooted in her own experience of the brain. She was mentally ill. All her life, she suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns, those horrible moments when her depression became suffocating. As a result, Woolf lived in fear of her own mind, exquisitely sensitive to its fevered “vibrations.” Introspection was her only medicine. “My own psychology interests me,” she confessed to her journal. “I intend to keep full notes of my ups and downs for my private information. And thus objectified, the pain and shame become at once much less. (…)

Woolf never recovered. Her constant state of reflection, her wariness for hints of the return of her devastating depression, left an indelible scar on her writing. “Nerves” is one of her favorite words. Its medical varieties–neurosis, neurasthenia, nervous breakdown, neuroasthenic–continually enter her prose, their sharp, scientific pang contradicting the suppleness of her character’s internal soliloquies. In Woolf’s diary, notes on form were always interwoven with comments on headaches.

In other words, Woolf’s mental illness forced her to think about her mind, which fueled her modernist writing style. But the illness itself was an obstacle: she wrote in spite of it, not because of it.

That said, there are some interesting connections between schizotypal individuals - schizotypy is a mental condition that resembles schizophrenia, albeit with far less severe symptoms - and creativity, at least as measured in the psychology lab.

{ Jonah Lehrer/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Jackson Eaton }

Faulty male introspection may explain why men so often misinterpret women’s indirect messages to stop or slow down the escalation of sexual intimacy, according to new research by UC Davis communication professor Michael Motley.

“When she says ‘It’s getting late,’ he may hear ‘So let’s skip the preliminaries,’” Motley says. “The problem is that he is interpreting what she said by trying to imagine what he would mean — and the only reason he can imagine saying ‘It’s getting late’ while making out is to mean ‘Let’s speed things up.’”

Motley calls it the “introspection” explanation: “Males’ inferred meanings for women’s indirect sexual resistance messages are more similar to the meanings males would have intended by those same messages than to the meanings women intend.”

Previous research has found that up to 85 percent of college women have had at least one experience in which a man attempts to escalate physical intimacy beyond the point that she has said “stop,” experiences they usually regard as unpleasant.

Motley’s research during the past decade suggests miscommunication is a significant reason for the problem in many cases. (The research does not address rape or other situations in which a man indeed understands “no” but ignores it.)

{ Physorg | Continue reading }

The human brain responds to being treated fairly the same way it responds to winning money and eating chocolate, UCLA scientists report. Being treated fairly turns on the brain’s reward circuitry.
 
“We may be hard-wired to treat fairness as a reward,” said study co-author Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology and a founder of social cognitive neuroscience.
 
“Receiving a fair offer activates the same brain circuitry as when we eat craved food, win money or see a beautiful face,” said Golnaz Tabibnia, said Golnaz Tabibnia, a postdoctoral scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. (…)

In the study, subjects were asked whether they would accept or decline another person’s offer to divide money in a particular way. If they declined, neither they nor the person making the offer would receive anything. Some of the offers were fair, such as receiving $5 out of $10 or $12, while others were unfair, such as receiving $5 out of $23.

Almost half the time, people agreed to accept offers of just 20 to 30 percent of the total money, but when they accepted these unfair offers, most of the brain’s reward circuitry was not activated. (…)

When people accepted the insulting offers, they tended to turn on a region of the prefrontal cortex that is associated with emotion regulation, while the insula (a region of the brain associated with disgust) was less active.
 
“We’re showing what happens in the brain when people swallow their pride,” Tabibnia said. “The region of the brain most associated with self-control gets activated and the disgust-related region shows less of a response.”

{ UCLA University | Continue reading }

illustration { Will Murai }

Should I wear the red blouse or the orange sweater, the skirt or the pants. Latte or cappuccino? muffin or scone? Should I drive or take the bus, or get some exercise and walk?

None of these decisions are particularly important, or even interesting, but according to Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and her colleagues, making choices, no matter how trivial, exhausts the human brain, no matter how smart, accomplished, educated or easy-going you might be.

In a series of laboratory and field trials, the researchers discovered that people can’t do the most simple tasks well after being faced with choices in other matters, even choices that were trivial or had no consequences.

They also found that after choosing this or that, people are also easily distracted by anything but the task at hand, which might explain such things as procrastination or being inexplicably drawn to video games.

Good self-control shares space with decision-making, Vohs said, in part of the brain’s prefrontal region — a wrinkly section just behind your forehead.

“We’re now looking at the relationship between overload of choice and self-control, and specific portions of the prefrontal region seem very much involved in both,” Vohs said, referring to new brain scan research her team is performing. “We think taxing one of them weakens that area and it’s not able to recover in time to engage in the other.”

Whether good or bad, small or large, she explained that the very act of deciding seems to steal away brain power for sticking to goals.

“Even if you just have to decide between two cups of coffee at Starbucks, it’s a small choice, true,” she said, “but doing that over the course of a day will, by the end of the day, render you less able to be good at self-control.”

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

The Rosenhan experiment was a famous experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted by David Rosenhan in 1972. It was published in the journal Science under the title “On being sane in insane places”. Rosenhan’s study consisted of two parts:

The first part involved the use of eight healthy associates or ‘pseudopatients’ who attempted to gain admission into 12 different psychiatric hospitals in 5 different states in various locations in the United States. During psychiatric assessment they claimed to be hearing voices that were often unclear, but noticeably said the words “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. No other psychiatric symptoms were claimed, and apart from giving false names and employment details, further biographical details were truthfully reported.

The pseudopatients were: a psychology graduate student in his twenties, three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife. None had a history of mental illness. After being admitted, the experimental subjects acted normally and did not display any obvious psychopathology. Subjects were to remain as inpatients until they were discharged by the staff at their hospitals, who were not privy to the experiment and believed the subjects to be real psychiatric patients.

All eight were admitted, seven with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the last with bipolar disorder. None of the pseudopatients were detected during their admission by hospital staff, although other psychiatric patients seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors.

During their stay, hospital notes indicated that staff interpreted much of the pseudopatient’s behaviour in terms of mental illness. For example, the note-taking of one individual was listed as “writing behaviour” and considered pathological.

For the second experiment, Rosenhan used a well-known research and teaching hospital, whose staff had heard of the results of the initial study but claimed that similar errors could not be made at their institution. Rosenhan arranged with them that during a three month period, one or more pseudopatients would attempt to gain admission and the staff would rate every incoming patient as to the likelihood they were an impostor. Out of 193 patients, 41 were considered to be impostors and a further 42 were considered suspect. In reality, Rosenhan had sent no pseudopatients and all patients suspected as impostors by the hospital staff were genuine patients (unless they were other impostors unknown to the study, which seems quite unlikely). This led to a conclusion that “any diagnostic process that lends itself too readily to massive errors of this sort cannot be a very reliable one”. Studies by others found similarly problematic diagnostic results.

Rosenhan published his findings in Science, criticising the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The study concluded “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals” and also illustrated the dangers of depersonalization and labelling in psychiatric institutions. His article generated an explosion of controversy.

Many defended psychiatry, arguing that as psychiatric diagnosis relies largely on the patient’s report of their experiences, faking their presence no more demonstrates problems with psychiatric diagnosis than lying about other medical symptoms. In this vein psychiatrist Robert Spitzer claimed in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan’s study:

If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labelled and treated me as having a peptic ulcer, I doubt I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.

However, Spitzer believed that despite the perceived shortcomings of Rosenhan’s study, there was still a laxness in the field. He played an important role updating psychiatric diagnosis, eventually resulting in the DSM-IV, in an attempt to make it more rigorous and reliable.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Darcy Hemley }

Hallucinations can affect any of the senses including sight (visual hallucinations), hearing sounds of voices (auditory hallucinations) or other senses (e.g. taste hallucinations).

Hallucinations can occur from many causes, ranging from causes such as hallucinations from a high fever (esp. in children or the elderly), various types of drug use or intoxication, brain disorders (e.g. epilepsy), or from delusional disorders such as schizoprenia (and variants of these disorders).

{ WrongDiagnosis }

For some people, hearing voices in their heads is a positive experience, not a sign of mental illness or cause for distress.

Traditionally these auditory hallucinations, as psychologists call them, are associated with mental illness. They can be a symptom of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and sometimes depression.

But studies by Dutch researchers that began in the 1990s found that some healthy people also regularly hear voices.

They found that more people might hear voices than psychologists had thought, perhaps around 4 percent of the population.

{ LiveScience }

Some hear choruses singing folk songs, others hear Mozart or even the Glenn Miller Orchestra — but there is no music; they are hallucinating.

Researchers have connected lesions on the dorsal pons, a part of the brain stem, with multiple cases of musical hallucinations. Lesions such as these are most often caused by stroke but can also be the result of tumors, encephalitis, or abscesses.

The case study outlined in this issue of Neurology involves a 57-year-old with symptoms including dizziness and right-sided numbness of his body. An MRI showed a lesion, or abnormal growth, in the dorsal pons which turned out to be an abscess with bacterial meningitis. Antibiotics were administered and the patient improved rapidly.

However, during his recovery, the patient developed continuous auditory hallucinations in his right ear, consisting of men’s and children’s choruses singing folk songs.

Only 10 other cases of musical hallucinations with dorsal pons lesions have ever been reported.

{ ScienceDaily }

photo { Joel Barhamand }

The amount of stress we endure is increasing because of our focus on efficiency. Stress is caused by uncertainty, more specifically, by doubts in our ability to handle something. As machines and computers handle more things that are predictable and certain, we are pressured to deal with more things that are unpredictable and uncertain. This inevitably leads to more stress. As soon as our tasks become predictable and certain, we automate them using our technology. The result of this process of streamlining is that we are increasingly called upon to use our, what I would call, irrational abilities, such as instincts, sensibilities, creativities, and interpersonal skills. These things are, by nature, unpredictable.

Take stock trading, for instance. When there were no computers to process the trades, the number of trades you could do in a day was limited. A certain amount of your work as a trader involved processing of paperwork, communicating with others, and doing some arithmetic; tasks that are predictable and not stressful. Today, a click of a button essentially takes care of all of those predictable tasks, and you skip right ahead to another stressful decision-making.

As another example, take graphic designers. Now with computers handling everything from typesetting, layout, image processing, color management to printing, what used to be done by several specialists are now combined into one person. The number of jobs one can handle in a year increased dramatically. Now designers spend more time being creative, and less time creating the final products. This may sound good, but in terms of stress and rewards, it is not. Because creativity is irrational and unpredictable, coming up with a creative solution can be highly stressful. Designers now have to come up with significantly more creative solutions per year for the same amount of money. (…)

Despite all the stresses we deal with in our lives, we feel that we are running towards nowhere, very much like running on a treadmill. I believe this is because the whole nation, the whole economy, is on a treadmill. In analyzing our economic growth, we focus on matters that are actually irrelevant to our feelings. We falsely believe that technological advancement, increase in production, and providing greater choice would make us happier, but we have more indications to the contrary.

{ Dyske Suematsu | Continue reading }

illustration { Julienne Hsu }

Chances are if someone were to ask you, right now, if you were happy, you’d say you were. Claiming that you’re happy—that is, to an interviewer who is asking you to rate your “life satisfaction” on a scale from zero to ten—appears to be nearly universal, as long as you’re not living in a war zone, on the street, or in extreme emotional or physical pain. The Maasai of Kenya, soccer moms of Scarsdale, the Amish, the Inughuit of Greenland, European businessmen—all report that they are happy. When happiness researcher Ed Diener synthesized 916 surveys of over a million people in forty-five countries, he found that, on average, people placed themselves at seven on the zero-to-ten scale. (…)

For one thing, we tend to believe that how we feel now is how we felt before as well as how we’ll feel next month. And then next month comes, and our feelings are different, and we can’t understand why we’re not happy. (…)

There are some situations that are so universal that they’d seem ideal for surrogacy. If I’m thinking of having a child, I can ask friends, or siblings, or even my parents if they think it’s a good idea. Chances are, most of them will tell me to “go for it” because motherhood is one of the great joys of life. Survey data, however, does not bear this out. As Gilbert reports,

careful studies of how women feel as they go about their daily activities show that they are less happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television.

If Gilbert is correct that the only time a person can accurately say how he or she is feeling is right now, then this fact about the moment-to-moment unhappiness of mothers may suggest that another reason we don’t rely on surrogates is that evolution doesn’t want us to be happy all the time.

Neither, for that matter, does Eric Wilson. His short and gleefully peevish volume, Against Happiness, is an inventory of complaints about people who pursue happiness as a vocation, a birthright, or both. They’re deluded, he says, unrealistic, inauthentic. They fail to acknowledge the misery in the world, and live in emotionally gated communities. Their intentional obtuseness is the cause of cultural vapidity, environmental destruction, blandness, cupidity. Better to be “born to the blues,” as he is, he declares, and experience the world in all its dimensions.

{ NY Books | Continue reading }

photo { Corinne Day, Georgina, Brixton, London, 1995 }

More than three decades ago, two U.S. psychologists conducted an experiment that was equal parts funny and deadly serious.

They spun a roulette wheel and when it landed on the number 10, they asked some whether the number of African countries was greater or less than 10 per cent of the United Nations. Most people guessed that estimate was too low. Maybe the right answer was 25 per cent, they guessed.

The psychologists spun their roulette wheel a second time and when it landed on the number 65, they asked a second group whether African countries made up 65 per cent of the United Nations. That figure was too high, everyone agreed. Maybe the correct answer was 45 per cent.

The difference in the estimates of the two groups was tied to the original number they were given. It made no difference that the number was meaningless, that it came from a roulette wheel.

Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described the error as caused by a phenomenon known as “anchoring” — when you don’t know the answer to something, whatever starting point you have plays a powerful role in determining what you think is the right answer.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Fabrice Robin }

Steven J. Heine, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, wanted to see how people are affected by stereotypes about themselves. (…)

The women were given a math test, then asked to read an essay, and then given a second math exam. In two groups the women averaged between five and 10 correct answers out of 25 math questions. In the other two they averaged between 15 and 20 correct.

The women in the lower-scoring groups read essays that either contended that there is a genetic difference between men and women in math ability, or discussed the images of women in art — a reading which did not discuss math but was designed to remind them of being female. Those two groups not only fell short of the other women, but their performance declined between the two math tests, meaning they scored lower after reading the essays than before.

It’s a process psychologists call a “stereotype threat.” If a member of a group for which there is a negative stereotype is in a position to test the stereotype, they are likely to choke under the pressure.

{ AP/Dicovery Channel | Continue reading }

photo { The Deviants #3 (1969 UK) }

A man in Italy is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers. In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.

In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy, then calmly walked out. A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630).

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

I’m a trained hypnotist myself, so my first reaction was skepticism. You can’t hypnotize someone that quickly and reliably. But then I put on my criminal mastermind hat and tried to figure out how this crime could be committed as described.

The trick is to hypnotize the targets well ahead of the actual day of the robbery, perhaps several times, and weed out the people who don’t instantly return to the so-called trance state upon suggestion. Then on robbing day, a simple suggestion at the store or bank can produce the instant results you need. The subjects have been pre-trained.

The hard part of this scheme is finding a way to get the right people to agree to hypnosis ahead of time. I imagine he advertised in a local publication, offering to help people quit smoking or lose weight. When people called for an appointment he would ask what sounded like standard questions, including age and occupation. If someone had the right sort of job, he set up an appointment and started the process. On any given day, he could hypnotize several new clients while testing for the most susceptible subjects who also handle money.

The next part would be a bit tricky. You can’t get a hypnotized person to do something that would violate his basic sense of right and wrong, or to put himself in danger. The brain has some sort of safety mechanism to prevent that.

In the surveillance video on the web, the hypnotist is seen taking the money from the register himself while the clerk seemed to be watching. This might be part of his workaround. The clerk wasn’t committing the crime so much as observing it. And perhaps the hypnotist said he was borrowing the money, or the manager had asked him to bring it to him in the parking lot, or some other story that obscured the ethical boundaries.

It could work. He’d need to be an excellent hypnotist, but that isn’t so rare.

{ Scott Adams/Dilbert.blog | Continue reading }

related { A 57-year-old man walking with a cane entered the Bank of America branch at Broadway and 57th Street on Tuesday afternoon and passed a note to a teller demanding money. The teller gave him a bag of cash. Officers arrested the man outside the bank as he fled with the money bag. Bank of America says it doesn’t comment on robberies. | 1010 WINS }

Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skills of girls, but the biological reason why has remained a mystery until now.

Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.

The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method. (…)

“For girls, it didn’t matter if they heard the word or read the word,” Burman says. “It does suggest that girls are learning [language attributes] in a more abstract form, and that’s the ideal objective when we’re teaching things.”

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

illustration { sife }

related { Who’s better at giving directions, men or women }