Advancements in Meta Psychology

PTSD: Neurobiology Neurophysiologic Alterations in PTSD

2011-08-18T13:24:00.001-07:00

PTSD: Neurobiology Neurophysiologic Alterations in PTSD

View more presentations from dominic54

Understanding PTSD and ASD

2011-08-18T13:20:00.000-07:00

PTSD and ASD

View more presentations from Dawn-Elise Snipes

Intelligence is in the genes, researchers report

2011-08-11T21:50:00.001-07:00

chicagotribune.com
By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
August 10, 2011

Intelligence is in the genes, researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychology.

The international team, led by Ian Deary of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Peter Visscher of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, compared the DNA of more than 3,500 people, middle aged and older, who also had taken intelligence tests. They calculated that more than 40% of the differences in intelligence among test subjects was associated with genetic variation.

The genome-wide association study, as such broad-sweep genetic studies are known, suggested that humans inherit much of their smarts, and a large number of genes are involved.

Booster Shots asked Deary to answer a few questions about the research. The following is an edited version of our questions and his emailed responses.

What exactly were you looking for when you looked at test subjects' genetic information?

We studied over 3,500 people. We looked at over 500,000 individual locations on the chromosomal DNA where people are known to differ. We looked at the association between those DNA differences and two types of intelligence. One type of intelligence was on-the-spot thinking (fluid intelligence) and the other was vocabulary (crystallized intelligence).

You wrote in your paper that 40% of the variation in crystallized intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid intelligence is associated with genetic differences. How did you calculate those figures? And where does the rest of intelligence come from? Other genes, or environmental factors?

To estimate the proportion of variance associated with common genetic differences (in what are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) we used a new genetic statistics procedure invented by Professor Visscher and his colleagues in Brisbane, called GCTA. The rest of people's differences in those types of intelligence could come from genetic differences we were not able to capture, or from the environment.

Certainly, twin and adoption studies tell us that the environment makes an important contribution to intelligence differences throughout life, and especially in early childhood.

Is this the first time such a study has been attempted? How have scientists studied the relationship between genes and intelligence in the past?

There have been some studies looking at individual genes and sets of genes. And some smaller studies have been conducted with coarser genetic sweeps. This is the first study to use thousands of people, half a million genetic variants and to apply this new GCTA procedure to
estimate the genetic contribution directly from the genes.

Why would it be surprising that intelligence is an inherited trait? Many people might say this seems obvious.

It is not surprising to find that intelligence differences have some genetic foundation. Twin and adoption studies have been suggesting that for decades. But those studies make assumptions -- for example that the environment is just as similar for non-identical twins as for identical twins -- and people have questioned those assumptions.

Here, we bypass all that and test the DNA. What is not at all obvious is what the genetic contribution is. From our results, we can suggest that a substantial amount of the genetic contribution to intelligence differences comes from many, many small effects from genetic variants that are in linked with common variants (SNPs).

What parts of your study and analysis do you suspect might receive criticism, and on what grounds?

We don't point to individual genes among the 40%-50% of the variance we detected. We need far larger numbers to do that. We know now that it would be better to have ten times or more subjects than we tested.

We did not have exactly the same intelligence tests in each sample, so that might have led us to underestimate some effects. The GCTA procedure is not easy to understand, so it is hard for people to get their head round how the estimate for the genetic contribution is derived.

Autism, ADHD Share Genetic Similarities

2011-08-11T14:03:00.001-07:00

Autism, ADHD Share Genetic Similarities
August 11, 2011 | MyHealthNewsDaily

Similar genetic changes found in some people with ADHD and in some with autism may help explain why children with the hyperactivity disorder often have symptoms of other developmental disorders, a new study reports.

The study identified several genetic changes that are present in a small portion of both attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) patients and autism patients, and that are absent in people without these disorders.

Although it has been known that some autism and ADHD patients have certain rare genes in common, this is the first study "to compare the two conditions head to head, in an identical way," said study researcher Russell Schachar, senior scientist of psychiatry at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

In addition to finding a genetic overlap between the conditions, the study identified several genes not previously known to be involved in ADHD.

The research was published online Aug. 10 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Attention and autism
ADHD, a condition characterized by inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness, affects 4 percent of school-age children worldwide. Autism and its related disorders, whose symptoms include difficulty with social interactions and communication, affect approximately one of every 300 children. Scientists suspect that a combination of environmental and inherited factors leads to both conditions, but the specifics of the genetic pathways involved remain unclear, the researchers said.

Over the course of five years, the study researchers collected DNA and behavioral data from 248 children with ADHD and from 349 children with autism. Because these conditions can be misdiagnosed, the researchers first made sure the participants truly had them.

"We do one of the most painstaking kinds of assessments in ADHD literature," Schachar said. "It took essentially a day per participant."

The researchers analyzed the DNA of both groups of children, looking for a type of genetic change known as copy number variations (CNVs). In CNVs, a stretch of DNA includes a certain sequence repeated either too many or too few times. When the researchers compared the CNVs of ADHD patients with those of the autistic patients, they discovered several CNVs common to some members of both groups.

Twenty-two kids with ADHD had a CNV not found in healthy kids, and five of those kids had CNVs that also appeared in nine kids with autism, Schachar said.

"I would just characterize that as a modest amount of overlap, but overlap nonetheless," Schachar told MyHealthNewsDaily.

A link to other psychiatric disorders
"It's an interesting paper," said Dr. Joachim Hallmayer, associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who was not involved with the study.

But because Schachar's team found only a small number of instances of shared CNVs, Hallmayer said, "the big question is whether there are more of these rare alleles."

Schachar acknowledged that the number of ADHD and autism patients with these CNVs in common is small, but said it is still significant. The take-away message of the study is that "the genetic aspects of ADHD may be shared with other neurodevelopmental disorders, and we better figure out how that works," he said.

The specific find that Schachar called "most exciting" was the prevalence of mutations in the gene ASTN2, which is involved in the development of neurons. After discovering CNVs in ASTN2 in a few kids in both the ADHD and autism groups, the researchers further analyzed all the DNA samples from both groups of kids, and discovered other types of changes in that gene in eight more children with ADHD, and nine with autism.

These findings may indicate that disruption of this gene "is associated with a higher risk for neurophsychiatric disorder in general," the authors reported.

"Clearly these are genes that affect the development of the brain," Schachar said. But why changes in these genes "would be shaped into one disorder in one person and a different disorder in another person is going to be a question for a long time, I'm sure."

Existence: Where did my consciousness come from?

2011-08-01T23:02:00.000-07:00

29 July 2011 by Anil Ananthaswamy
http://tinyurl.com/3h5ln4s

THINK for a moment about a time before you were born. Where were you? Now think ahead to a time after your death. Where will you be? The brutal answer is: nowhere. Your life is a brief foray on Earth that started one day for no reason and will inevitably end.

But what a foray. Like the whole universe, your consciousness popped into existence out of nothingness and has evolved into a rich and complex entity full of wonder and mystery.

Contemplating this leads to a host of mind-boggling questions. What are the odds of my consciousness existing at all? How can such a thing emerge from nothingness? Is there any possibility of it surviving my death? And what is consciousness anyway?

Answering these questions is incredibly difficult. Philosopher Thomas Nagel once asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" Your response might be to imagine flying around in the dark, seeing the world in the echoes of high-frequency sounds. But that isn't the answer Nagel was looking for. He wanted to emphasise that there is no way of knowing what it is like for a bat to feel like a bat. That, in essence, is the conundrum of consciousness.

Neuroscientists and philosophers fall into two broad camps. One thinks that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain and that once we fully understand the intricate workings of neuronal activity, consciousness will be laid bare. The other doubts it will be that simple. They agree that consciousness emerges from the brain, but argue that Nagel's question will always remain unanswered: knowing every detail of a bat's brain cannot tell us what it is like to be a bat. This is often called the "hard problem" of consciousness, and seems scientifically intractable - for now.

Meanwhile, "there are way too many so-called easy problems to worry about", says Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.

One is to look for signatures of consciousness in brain activity, in the hope that this takes us closer to understanding what it is. Various brain areas have been found to be active when we are conscious of something and quiet when we are not. For example, Stanislas Dehaene of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Gif sur Yvette and colleagues have identified such regions in our frontal and parietal lobes (Nature Neuroscience, vol 8, p 1391).
Consciousness explained

This is consistent with a theory of consciousness proposed by Bernard Baars of the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, California. He posited that most non-conscious experiences are processed in specialised local regions of the brain such as the visual cortex. We only become conscious of this activity when the information is broadcast to a network of neurons called the global workspace - perhaps the regions pinpointed by Dehaene.

But others believe the theory is not telling the whole story. "Does global workspace theory really explain consciousness, or just the ability to report about consciousness?" asks Seth.

Even so, the idea that consciousness seems to be an emergent property of the brain can take us somewhere. For example, it makes the odds of your own consciousness existing the same as the odds of you being born at all, which is to say, very small. Just think of that next time you suffer angst about your impending return to nothingness.

As for whether individual consciousness can continue after death, "it is extremely unlikely that there would be any form of self-consciousness after the physical brain decays", says philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Extremely unlikely, but not impossible. Giuilio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison argues that consciousness is the outcome of how complex matter, including the brain, integrates information. "According to Tononi's theory, if one could build a device or a system that integrated information exactly the same way as a living brain, it would generate the same conscious experiences," says Seth. Such a machine might allow your consciousness to survive death. But it would still not know what it is like to be a bat.

Personality disorders category is likely to be dramatically revised for next psychiatry textbook

2011-07-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog

July 7, 2011

Several types of personality disorders will be dropped from the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But one disorder previously proposed for elimination -- narcissistic personality disorder -- will likely remain in the text.

The American Psychiatric Assn. announced Thursday that the framework for personality disorders in DSM-5 will be a "hybrid" model that is substantially different from how personality disorders are diagnosed currently. Under the new system, personality disorders will be aligned with particular personality traits and levels of impairment.

The committee working on the personality disorders chapter of the DSM-5, which is due to be published in 2013, has proposed six types of disorders: antisocial, avoidant, borderline, narcissistic, obsessive/compulsive and schizotypal. They have proposed dropping paranoid, histrionic, schizoid and dependent personality disorders.

However, to qualify for a diagnosis, a patient would have to have a high level of impairment in two areas of personality functioning -- self and interpersonal. Patients would be assessed for how they view themselves and how they pursue their goals in life, for example, as well as how they get along with other people and whether they think about the consequences of their actions. The new model is less rigid than the existing diagnostic model. It is designed to reflect that behavior can change over time while personality traits tend to remain stable.

"In the past, we viewed personality disorders as binary. You either had one or you didn't," said Dr. Andrew Skodol, chairman of the DSM work group on personality disorders, in a news release. "But now we understand that personality pathology is a matter of degree."

The American Psychiatric Assn. also announced that a public comment period on DSM-5 proposals has been extended through July 15.

This article can be found at: http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-personality-disorders-20110707,0,6126009.story

Idiot or Genius? Difference May Come Down to a Single Gene, Scientists Say

2011-05-18T18:32:00.000-07:00

May 17, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Two genetic letters out of the 3 billion in the human genetic alphabet may spell the difference between a genius and an idiot, according to a new report.

A genetic analysis led by an international collaboration of scientists from the Yale School of Medicine determined that that tiny variation -- just two genetic letters within a single gene -- determines the intelligence potential or lack thereof of a human brain.

The report appeared online May 15 in the journal of Nature Genetics.

In normal brain function, convolutions, the deep fissures of the brain, increase the overall surface area, one of the primary determinants for intelligence. Deeper folds in the brain allow for rational and abstract thought, scientists believe.

In the latest finding, a team of researchers analyzed a Turkish patient whose brain lacks those characteristic convolutions in part of his cerebral cortex, a sheet of brain tissue that plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language and consciousness.

The cause of this drastic cerebral deformity was pinned down to a gene called laminin gamma3 (LAMC3) with similar variations discovered in other patients with the same medical condition.

"The demonstration of the fundamental role of this gene in human brain development affords us a step closer to solve the mystery of the crown jewel of creation, the cerebral cortex," said Murat Gunel, senior author of the paper, co-director of the Neurogenetics Program and professor of genetics and neurobiology at Yale.

The folding of the brain is seen only in mammals with larger brains, such as dolphins and apes, and is most pronounced in humans. These fissures expand the surface area of the cerebral cortex and allow for complex thought and reasoning without taking up more space in the skull. Such foldings aren't seen in mammals such as rodents or other animals.

Despite the importance of these foldings, no one has been able to explain how the brain manages to create them. The LAMC3 gene may be crucial to the process.

"Although the same gene is present in lower organisms with smooth brains such as mice, somehow over time, it has evolved to gain novel functions that are fundamental for human occipital cortex formation and its mutation leads to the loss of surface convolutions, a hallmark of the human brain," Gunel said.

Poetry, film give voice for OCD sufferers

2011-05-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- "I'm edging towards being a recluse, but choose daily to fight for release from this crippling prison."

This is how Gemma Boyd describes her life with obsessive compulsive disorder, a mental illness marked by unwanted thoughts and repeated behaviors or rituals intended to reduce anxiety. She wrote these words in a poem last November, the first time she tried to deal with her daily struggles through creative writing.

Boyd, a 35-year-old British musician and poet, shared her poem online with Machine Man, an online forum where anyone with something to say about OCD can submit art, creative writing and multimedia projects, in addition to joining conversations about the condition. The forum is the online counterpart to a movie project called "Machine Man," both of which aim to spread greater awareness of OCD.

The film will aim to "get it out there what OCD really is, and take away some of the shame and stigma," said Kellie Madison, writer and director of "Machine Man."

It will portray a young man's struggle with OCD, showing how intense anxiety and compulsions quickly take over his life and prevent him from pursuing a relationship with the woman he loves. The script is complete, and production is still in the fundraising stages.

In the online forum, Boyd and others with OCD have found a safe space to express a part of themselves previously shrouded in silence. And they're energized by the prospect of a movie that would both represent their struggles and educate a wide audience about the disorder.

"I'm hoping that I'll be able to have a platform with this movie, and to try to really change my life around, because I have no choice but to do that," said Stephanie, a poetry contributor to the "Machine Man" forum who suffers from OCD, who asked that her last name not be used.

About 2% of adults in the United States have OCD, according to the National Institutes of Health. Across the ocean, where Boyd lives, about 1% of the United Kingdom's population is thought to have it, although this estimate is probably low, says the organization OCD-UK.

The illness often has an element of predisposition, meaning some people are more likely to develop it than others, said John Tsilimparis, an OCD therapist in Los Angeles. In fact, there is some evidence that people with OCD have distinct brain activity patterns. Stressful situations and traumatic events can trigger symptoms.

"I'm the architect still, I forgot how to draw. My healthy balance and perspective is a bit flawed. I'm OCD, tried for perfection for too many reasons," writes Stephanie in a recent poem called "My Frame".

For Boyd, 35, it was a traumatic event (which she'd prefer to keep private) that got her obsessively worrying about contamination about five years ago. But prior that, she had a mountain of bad memories from being sexually abused as a child that she'd repressed, and which also fueled her anxiety.

The intrusive thoughts started with a fear of blood. Over time they expanded; she became afraid of being attacked by men, any men, and could vividly imagine assaults even from male friends. In some of the worst periods, she couldn't leave her house because she kept checking and checking appliances, fearing a fire or home invasion.

"Relentlessly checking and re-checking numbers, magazine pages, text messages, household appliances -- everything -- causes my nerves to jangle 24-7: a gradual wearing down of brain function and twisting and twirling children who repeat and repeat aggravate my stifled anger," Boyd wrote in her poem.

To this day, she avoids many situations she used to enjoy so that she can avoid social contact: swimming pools, movie theaters, and restaurants.

"It's a battle against things which lots of people take for granted. I don't let it completely ruin my life, but it has made my life an uphill struggle," she said.

Crowds are out of the question -- unless, curiously enough, the people are listening to her play music. A professional musician, Boyd has found that the anxiety that restricts her in daily life isn't as bad when she's behind the double bass (her website lists six gigs lined up in May already). Music has been a sort of medicine, she says.

"When I'm performing, because I've got an instrument in front of me, I feel I'm protected a bit," she said. "When I'm in a normal situation, I feel as if I haven't got a skin."

As freely as OCD may be mentioned these days in popular culture -- a recent episode of "Glee" focused on it, for example -- Boyd had a tough time getting help near her hometown of Brighton and Hove, England.

She underwent several psychological assessments before receiving the diagnoses of OCD and post-traumatic stress disorder. Then she waited. And waited. It took about three years before she got to see a therapist who was supposed to be the best person in the area for OCD relating to sexual abuse. As it turns out, the therapist admitted that she didn't know much about OCD at all. Boyd stuck with her anyway for two years, but it only partially helped.

"I'm scared of opening up and then being told that there's no help available," she said. "Instead of seeking that help, I'll read the literature (about OCD), which isn't ideal."

Boyd has gotten some of her most critical OCD education through watching television and reading. The A&E program "Obsessed" taught her the difference between "obsession" and "compulsion," as well as the biological underpinnings of the disorder and various kinds of therapies.

A behavioral treatment shown to help people with OCD is called exposure therapy. Basically, the patient is forced to confront her fears -- for example, going out in public if she wouldn't normally, or letting time pass without checking to see if appliances were left on. The therapist systematically helps the person desensitize herself, Tsilimparis said. Psychiatrists may also prescribe drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which help depression as well.

Since Boyd's struggle with OCD has become more difficult recently, she's eager to investigate more OCD-specific treatment options in her country.

She does not take medication, and has decided against it for the time being. She has tried exposure therapy techniques on her own, but it's exhausting without support.

"You do need somebody to physically be there while you're experiencing these feelings, which I think can be pretty terrifying," she said.

On the bright side, Boyd has received positive feedback on her poem in the "Machine Man" forum, and some people have asked her to write more about it. She says she probably will.

"It's kind of helped me feel not so alone with my OCD," she said. "Hopefully, I've helped other people see they're not alone."

Osama bin Laden's death: How should we feel?

2011-05-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- You may be relieved or even ecstatic about the end of a symbol of terror, or maybe it seems like the pain is just beginning all over again.

Both of these reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. troops in Pakistan, are natural, experts say.

From the celebrations in Washington and New York, it looks like lots of people are happy. Chants of "USA! USA!" reverberated outside the White House and at New York's ground zero as crowds celebrated the death of the terrorist leader, President Obama announced Sunday.

As far as the collective American psyche goes, it makes sense that this is a moment of celebration, says Columbia University psychiatrist Dr. Jeffery Lieberman. The country has been experiencing emotional malaise, with a slow-moving economy, a sense of America losing its No. 1 status in the world, and a decade of pent-up anguish about the threat of terrorism. Much like the World War II years, these have been uncertain times.

Then, rumors of bin Laden's death, confirmed by an announcement from the president, lifted that burden of pain and helplessness.

"In the blink of an eye, the gloom and doom and pessimism has dissipated," Lieberman said.

After bin Laden: What does it mean to you?

But wait a minute: Should we rejoice in the death of another human being?

But although bin Laden claimed responsibility for the destruction of the World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of Americans, the outpouring of celebration doesn't feel right for everyone.

David Sirota, a newspaper columnist and a contributor to Salon felt uncomfortable with the jubilation because he said there is a "difference between relief and euphoria."

"A euphoric response instead of somber relief suggests that we are celebrating revenge. We are not celebrating an end to the war," he said, comparing it to the public's euphoria when World War II ended.

"What's a little scary about this: We were once a country that saw violence as regrettable, but sometimes necessary act. But we're not celebrating end of violence, but the exercise of it."

Josh Pesavento, 22, a journalism student in New York who photographed the cheering crowds in Times Square on Monday morning, also felt conflicted about the celebrations he witnessed.

"I don't believe that any person has the right to kill anyone, and I don't think that we should be cheering for yet more loss of life. However, I tell myself that in this situation, these people may be cheering for the end of an icon who led to the death of far, far too many," Pesavento said.

For some, bin Laden represents an idea more than a person who lived and died. More than the death of a human being, this ends the life of a powerful symbol of terrorism and destruction, said Nadine Kaslow, psychologist at Emory University. Bin Laden's death hits closer to home in the U.S. than the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein, for example, because the Iraqi dictator did not directly attack American soil, she said.

The celebratory mood reflects a sense that fairness and justice had been restored and that a terrorist got his comeuppance, said Kaslow.

"I think people feel like this guy got what he deserved. It was a sense that it was 'our family' that was killed," she said.

But there are likely others who aren't chanting on the streets for whom the death of bin Laden brings back painful memories of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she said.

People who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001, may have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the killing of bin Laden may open old wounds, Lieberman said.

"It doesn't bring their loved ones back. It doesn't ease their pain. There was so much more to this than catching bin Laden. At best, they would be bittersweet: It feels good to have the relief of this guy being gone, but the pain of their loss is very strong and very real to them," said Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a Yale University psychologist.

Diana Massaroli, who lost her husband, Michael Massaroli, in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, said the news of bin Laden's death made her feel an "overall calm that I haven't felt in 10 years."

"I feel better ... like I can start a new chapter in my life."

Sirota and Kaslow likened bin Laden's death to the execution of a convicted murderer of someone's family, which may bring a sense of closure for some. In the case of bin Laden, though, there is fear of retaliation from terrorist groups.

"Relief also comes with a kind of sadness that the victims can never be brought back and sadness at the world that creates such a perpetrator," Sirota said.

Even people who didn't feel the direct impact of the attacks on September 11, 2001, will feel relief, Kaslow said. After all, everyone gets reminded of the global insecurity that resulted whenever they go to the airport.

The terrorist leader's living situation also doesn't bring about any sympathy -- he wasn't starving and struggling in a cave, but rather lived in a mansion, which adds to his perceived arrogance, Kaslow said.

The news of bin Laden's death "allows us to put some sort of order" to the horror of 9-11 because otherwise, "it's upsetting, disconcerting when we're reminded how unpredictable life, death and the world around us could be," said Sam Sommer, associate professor of psychology at Tufts University.

People's reactions are likely tied to how emotionally and personally they felt to the events 10 years ago, Sommer said.

"It seems to me that the emotional reaction had a lot to do with the differences in how people view this -- whether it's the right triumphing over evil -- a lot of young people are viewing this in that way," Nolen-Hoeksema said.

She noted that her teenage son and his friends were enthusiastically tweeting about the news in a tone that "this is a bad guy, the good guys got him finally -- that's all they are seeing." After, all Jack Bauer of "24" was trending on Twitter.

But the one common factor was that everyone felt a need to share the news and their observations -- whether it was rallying in front of the White House, or tweeting or updating their Facebook page.

"These emotionally charged events send us back to our social roots and make us need to affiliate with other people," Sommer said.

CNN's Nicole Saidi contributed to this report.

Do women like adult media and content as much as men?

2011-04-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

By, Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and New York Times best-selling author.

If you’d asked me this question a couple of years ago, I would have said “no.” But the times they are a-changing: just as female infidelity is on the rise, women are catching up to the guys in other ways, too - including a propensity for porn.

As a sex therapist and founder of the website Good in Bed, here’s what I’m observing:

– More couples are enjoying porn together, with women often taking the lead in choosing the material.

– More women are using porn to get themselves in the mood for sex or to enjoy their sexuality on their own.

– More women are using porn to learn new sexual techniques or to explore sexually adventurous situations.

– More women are using porn to satisfy a general curiosity about sex overall, and

– More women are comfortable and confident in asserting their opinions on the subject.

In short, women are increasingly using porn for pretty much the same reasons (and pleasures) as men. Meanwhile, guys are increasingly surprised to discover that their female partners are interested in porn - and tend to be even more surprised to discover what they’re watching (I’ll get to that in a moment).

So what’s going on? Why the apparent change? To be honest, I’d always been of the mind that men and women are somewhat different when it comes to porn, for both biological and sociological reasons:

On the biological side, I’ve often said female sexual desire is more complex than male desire, and that porn rather clearly illustrates that difference: In men, visual stimulation leads quickly to sexual arousal, and with that chain of arousal often comes a desire to be stimulated to orgasm. In that sense, arousal and desire are very closely related, and it’s one of the reasons that Viagra has been so successful with men: Give a guy an erection and he basically wants to use it. In men, porn initiates the “sexual-circuit” very quickly.

That’s not to say that women don’t respond to visual stimulation either, or that that stimulation doesn’t lead to genital arousal, but that arousal doesn’t always trigger desire in women the way that it does with men.

When I talk to guys about their porn use, many describe a lack of pre-meditation. For example, a guy could be hanging out on his computer, checking out his favorite sports site, when up pops an ad with a sexy woman in a bikini and, bang, next thing he knows he’s trawling porn sites in search of sexual release.

With women, however, the use of porn or the desire/decision to have an orgasm is often less opportunistic. A woman may see something super-sexy, and recognize it as sexy, and even arousing, but that doesn’t mean she’s necessarily going to stop what she’s doing to stimulate herself to orgasm. (By the way, if you don’t agree with any of this, please chime in below in the comments - sexual desire is by no means a one size fits all model: everyone is different and topic of women and porn is a highly debated one.)

On a more sociological level, generations of women have been told that porn is evil: that it exploits, objectifies, and degrades women, and that a woman who enjoys porn is a betrayer of Women. Some may still feel this is true, (and there are plenty of women who feel uncomfortable with porn), but there are also plenty of women who would beg to disagree and look at porn as a fairly innocuous form of erotic escapism that’s a personal choice and not a big deal.

Additionally, many women have contended that porn, until fairly recently, was never really created with female customers in mind; that porn was designed to appeal to men and lacked elements that were more organic to female sexuality, such as foreplay, intimacy and erotic storylines.

Well, today there are many porn sites geared toward women. In fact, there’s even a regular Feminist Porn Awards that recognizes erotic entertainment that is smart, sexy, and appreciates women as viewers.

Combine a recognition of a female audience with the rapid proliferation of easily accessible Internet porn, and it only makes sense that more women are enjoying porn. (By the way, if you’re a woman and you’re interested in dipping a toe - or perhaps nose-diving - into the world of porn, I suggest checking out the work of Violet Blue and her book, "The Smart Girl's Guide to Porn." Or if porn isn’t your thing, but you’re interested in some hot erotic literature, take a look at the anthologies that are edited by Rachel Kramer Bussell.)

As it turns our women may be able to enjoy porn with less guilt, or at least with less grief from their male partners. In my experience, women tend to worry a lot more about their man’s porn habits and what it means to their relationship, whereas many of the men I’ve spoken with tend to be intrigued by the idea of women and porn - especially since women are much more likely to enjoy porn that does not directly reflect their sexual orientation.

One study at Northwestern University, for example, examined the effects of porn on genital arousal and concluded that men responded more intensely to porn that correlated to their particular sexual orientation, whereas women tended to be genitally aroused by a much broader spectrum of erotic material. Who knows –- perhaps the enormous variety of material offered by the Internet will end up playing more to the spectrum of female desire than male desire in the long run?

For the moment, it would seem that women are not watching porn nearly as much as men. Recently, a researcher from the University of Montreal set out to study whether pornography had an impact on guys’ sex lives. He searched for men in their 20s who'd never consumed porn, and guess what? He couldn't find a single one. I can still show you plenty of women who have never looked at porn - but perhaps not for long.

So do women like porn as much as men? You tell me.

Understanding what bipolar disorder is and how to diagnose if you have it.

2011-04-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Bipolar disorder involves periods of elevated or irritable mood (mania), alternating with periods of depression. The "mood swings" between mania and depression can be very abrupt.
Causes, incidence, and risk factors

Bipolar disorder affects men and women equally. It usually appears between ages 15 - 25. The exact cause is unknown, but it occurs more often in relatives of people with bipolar disorder.

Types of bipolar disorder:

People with bipolar disorder type I have had at least one fully manic episode with periods of major depression. In the past, bipolar disorder type I was called manic depression.

People with bipolar disorder type II have never experienced full-fledged mania. Instead they experience periods of hypomania (elevated levels of energy and impulsiveness that are not as extreme as the symptoms of mania). These hypomanic periods alternate with episodes of depression.

A mild form of bipolar disorder called cyclothymia involves less severe mood swings with alternating periods of hypomania and mild depression. People with bipolar disorder type II or cyclothymia may be misdiagnosed as having depression alone.

In most people with bipolar disorder, there is no clear cause for the manic or depressive episodes. The following may trigger a manic episode in people who are vulnerable to the illness:

Life changes such as childbirth

Medications such as antidepressants or steroids

Periods of sleeplessness

Recreational drug use

Symptoms

The manic phase may last from days to months and can include the following symptoms:

Agitation or irritation

Inflated self-esteem (delusions of grandeur, false beliefs in special abilities)

Little need for sleep

Noticeably elevated mood

Hyperactivity

Increased energy

Lack of self-control

Racing thoughts

Over-involvement in activities

Poor temper control

Reckless behavior

Binge eating, drinking, and/or drug use

Impaired judgment

Sexual promiscuity

Spending sprees

Tendency to be easily distracted

These symptoms of mania are seen with bipolar disorder I. In people with bipolar disorder II, hypomanic episodes involve similar symptoms that are less intense.

The depressed phase of both types of bipolar disorder includes the following symptoms:

Daily low mood

Difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions

Eating disturbances

Loss of appetite and weight loss

Overeating and weight gain

Fatigue or listlessness

Feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness and/or guilt

Loss of self-esteem

Persistent sadness

Persistent thoughts of death

Sleep disturbances

Excessive sleepiness

Inability to sleep

Suicidal thoughts

Withdrawal from activities that were once enjoyed

Withdrawal from friends

There is a high risk of suicide with bipolar disorder. While in either phase, patients may abuse alcohol or other substances, which can make the symptoms worse.

Sometimes there is an overlap between the two phases. Manic and depressive symptoms may occur together or quickly one after the other in what is called a mixed state.
Signs and tests

A diagnosis of bipolar disorder involves consideration of many factors. The health care provider may do some or all of the following:

Ask about your family medical history, particularly whether anyone has or had bipolar disorder

Ask about your recent mood swings and for how long you've experienced them

Observe your behavior and mood

Perform a thorough examination to identify or rule out physical causes for the symptoms

Request laboratory tests to check for thyroid problems or drug levels

Speak with your family members to discuss their observations about your behavior

Take a medical history, including any medical problems you have and any medications you take

Note: Use of recreational drugs may be responsible for some symptoms, though this does not rule out bipolar affective disorder. Drug abuse may itself be a symptom of bipolar disorder.
Treatment

Spells of depression or mania return in most patients, in spite of treatment. The major goals of treatment are to:

Avoid cycling from one phase to another

Avoid the need for a hospital stay

Help the patient function as best as possible between episodes

Prevent self-destructive behavior, including suicide

Reduce the severity and frequency of episodes

The doctor will first try to determine what may have triggered the mood episode, and identify any medical or emotional problems that might interfere with or complicate treatment.

Drugs called mood stabilizers are considered to be the first-line treatment. The following are commonly used mood stabilizers:

Carbamazepine

Lamotrigine

Lithium

Valproate (valproic acid)

Other antiseizure drugs may also be tried.

Other drugs used to treat bipolar disorder include:

Antipsychotic drugs and anti-anxiety drugs (benzodiazepines), which can be used to stabilize mood

Antidepressant medications can be added to mood-stabilizing drugs to treat depression. People with bipolar disorder are more likely to have manic or hypomanic episodes if they are put on antidepressants. Because of this, an antidepressant is only used in people who are also taking a mood stabilizer.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) may be used to treat the manic or depressive phase of bipolar disorder that does not respond to medication.

ECT is a psychiatric treatment that uses an electrical current to cause a brief seizure of the central nervous system while the patient is under anesthesia.

ECT is the most effective treatment for depression that is not relieved with medications.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) uses high frequency magnetic pulses that target affected areas of the brain. It is most often used as a second-line treatment after ECT.

Patients who are in the middle of manic or depressive episodes may need to stay in a hospital until their mood is stabilized and their behaviors are under control.

Doctors are still trying to decide the best way to treat bipolar disorder in children and adolescents. Parents should consider the potential risks and benefits of treatment for their children.

SUPPORT PROGRAMS AND THERAPIES

Family treatments that combine support and education about bipolar disorder (psychoeducation) appear to help families cope and reduce the odds of symptoms returning. Programs that emphasize outreach and community support services can help people who lack family and social support.

Important skills include:

Coping with symptoms that are present even while taking medications

Learning a healthy lifestyle, including getting enough sleep and staying away from recreational drugs

Learning to take medications correctly and how to manage side effects

Learning to watch for early signs of a relapse, and knowing how to react when they occur

Family members and caregivers are very important in the treatment of bipolar disorder. They can help patients seek out proper support services, and help make sure the patient follows medication therapy.

Getting enough sleep is extremely important in bipolar disorder, because a lack of sleep can trigger a manic episode. Psychotherapy may be a useful option during the depressive phase. Joining a support group may be particularly helpful for bipolar disorder patients and their loved ones.

A patient with bipolar disorder cannot always reliably tell the doctor about the state of the illness. Patients often have difficulty recognizing their own manic symptoms.

Mood variations in bipolar disorder are not predictable, so it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a patient is responding to treatment or naturally emerging from a bipolar phase.

Treatment strategies for children and the elderly have not been well-studied, and have not been clearly defined.

Expectations (prognosis)

Mood-stabilizing medication can help control the symptoms of bipolar disorder. However, patients often need help and support to take medicine properly and to ensure that any episodes of mania and depression are treated as early as possible.

Some people stop taking the medication as soon as they feel better or because they want to experience the productivity and creativity associated with mania. Although these early manic states may feel good, discontinuing medication may have very negative consequences.

Suicide is a very real risk during both mania and depression. Suicidal thoughts, ideas, and gestures in people with bipolar affective disorder require immediate emergency attention.
Complications

Stopping or improperly taking medication can cause your symptoms to come back, and lead to the following complications:

Alcohol and/or drug abuse as a strategy to "self-medicate"

Personal relationships, work, and finances suffer

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors

This illness is challenging to treat. Patients and their friends and family must be aware of the risks of neglecting to treat bipolar disorder.
Calling your health care provider

Call your health provider or an emergency number right way if:

You are having thoughts of death or suicide

You are experiencing severe symptoms of depression or mania

You have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and your symptoms have returned or you are having any new symptoms

References

Moore DP, Jefferson JW. Bipolar disorder. In: Moore DP, Jefferson JW, eds. Handbook of Medical Psychiatry. 2nd ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Mosby Elsevier;2004:chap 80.
Schiffer RB. Psychiatric disorders in medical practice. In: Goldman L, Ausiello D, eds. Cecil Medicine. 23rd ed. Philadelphia, Pa:Saunders Elsevier;2007:chap 420.
Benazzi F. Bipolar disorder -- focus on bipolar II disorder and mixed depression. Lancet. 2007;369:935-945. [PubMed]
Morriss RK, Faizal MA, Jones AP, Williamson PR, Bolton C, McCarthy JP. Interventions for helping people recognise early signs of recurrence in bipolar disorder. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2007;24;(1):CD004854. [PubMed]
Sachs GS, Nierenberg AA, Calabrese JR, et al. Effectiveness of adjunctive antidepressant treatment for bipolar depression. N Engl J Med. 2007;356:1711-1722. [PubMed]

7 tips for moving past a rotten childhood

2011-04-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

Author Tracy McMillan knows a thing or two about getting over a bad childhood. Her father was a drug-dealing pimp and convicted felon who spent most of his daughter's life behind bars. Her prostitute mother gave her away.

Here's what she wants you to know about getting over your past.

1. Get a new story

There are two ways for me to look at my childhood story. In one, I'm a person who is so unloved and unwanted, my own mother gave me away.

In the other, I was born, took a look around at my prostitute mother and criminal father, and said to myself, "I can totally do better than this. Get your stuff, we're leaving." In one I'm a victim, in the other, I'm in power.

2. Realize blame = same

Blame is awesome. It feels good, right? It feels righteous. It feels powerful. It feels like someone's going to pay for what they did to you.

The only problem is -- as long as you're blaming -- nothing can ever change. Why? Because in order for your life to change, you have to want things to be different.

And if it feels good to blame, you have to admit that you like it. And if you like it, you have to admit that you don't really want it to change. Which is why blame just gets you more of the same.

3. Pretend you work at a retail store

Sometimes, I look at my bad childhood like it's an unruly customer and I'm working customer service the day after Christmas. It'll be acting up, moaning and complaining about how hard everything is, and how unfair it all is.

I just have to say to it, "Yes, I see you, ma'am. I know you have a problem. But right now I'm busy, so please have a seat. I''ll be with you just as soon as I can."

Then I do something productive that will actually change my situation, like go to work.

4. Accept the fact that some don't really want you to succeed

This sounds harsh, and it is. But it's true.

Some of your family and friends "support" you by cosigning all your b.s. about how hard you have it, because if you succeed, two things will happen:
1) You will leave. And 2) They will be left behind.

This doesn't mean you have to get rid of your friends and family, you just have to remember that they love you so much, they're perfectly happy for you to stay exactly where you are right now.

5. Decide to KSA (Kick some ass)

When my 13-year-old said he hated science class, I told him that getting a 95 on the test was the equivalent of getting in the face of his least favorite teacher and saying, "Have some!"

In other words, kicking ass on the test is just like playing a video game. Needless to say, he's getting As now. Channeling your anger will get you a long, long way in life.

6. Hoard your money

The number one way to end your bad childhood is to save money. I have a very simple rule about money: If I never spend everything I make, I will always have money. And money is power.

All those commercials you see are a big, rich company's attempt to get you to give them your power. Don't do it! Think of every dollar you save as one step away from the people and places that have kept you down.

7. Get a paper route

In fifth grade, I wanted a 10-speed bike like all the other kids had. So I started delivering papers when I was 11. In Minnesota. In the winter.

Compared to that, every job I've had since has been easy. While there may not be papers to deliver in the snow, the point is to do the thing you don't want to do.

Get a hard/crappy job and do it until the voices in your head stop telling you that you can't take it another minute. Everything after that will be cake, and your bad childhood will be over. I promise.

Sexual side effects: A silent epidemic?

2011-04-11T13:41:00.001-07:00

By, Ian Kerner

Are meds zapping your mojo? Is a prescription inhibiting your passion? If so, you’re far from alone. More than 27 million Americans take antidepressant drugs and research suggests that 37 percent of those people experience sexual side effects. And that’s just in the category of antidepressants! When you consider that millions of drugs are prescribed for common medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, and that many of those drugs can lead to sexual dysfunction of some sort, it’s no wonder that nearly 40 million Americans describe themselves as being stuck in sexless marriages. Many of us may be grappling with a sexual problem and not even realize that a drug or drug combination could be the underlying cause. In this sense, sexual side effects could be a silent epidemic.

But for many people going off their medications simply isn’t an option. In the case of antidepressants, most people who take them are actually happier than they were before they went on the drugs, and while they may be dealing with sexual side effects such as erectile disorder or loss of desire, they weren’t necessarily interested in sex before the medication either. “After addressing your depression, anxiety, or other mental health concern, you're interested in sex again—enough to worry about how the medication is affecting your sex life,” explains my Good in Bed colleague, psychiatrist Dr. Ed Ratush. “You may be bothered by what you think is a lower sex drive, but consider how you felt before. In a way, your libido has actually increased!”

Sexual side effects don’t have to destroy your sex life, but they may mean that you have to change your approach to sex. In the case of low desire (a very common sexual side effect), you may have to put your body through the motions in order to get your mind to follow. Or you may have to spend a lot more time on foreplay and getting yourself physiologically aroused. Ratush suggests trying a sexual warm-up, a technique that helps generate arousal but intentionally does not lead to climax or ejaculation. “The idea is that the process of getting aroused will increase the person's ability to generate more of the sex hormone testosterone later in the day or later in the week,” he says.

And remember that mental stimulation plays a big role in sexual arousal, so you may have to try some new things and develop some new routines.

What are some other things you can do?

Talk to your doctor. Sounds simple enough, but many people are uncomfortable talking about sex with their doctors and, believe it or not, many doctors are uncomfortable as well. Not all doctors are adequately trained in human sexuality, and many don’t take the time to discuss all of a patient’s needs. It can be challenging to start a conversation about sex, but it’s worth it: Your doctor may be able to switch you to a similar medication with fewer side effects. Some people find that switching from Celexa to Lexapro, for example, helps treat their depression without affecting their sex life.
Reduce your dose. It’s possible that you can still achieve benefits of medication, but at a lower dose that may not induce sexual side effects.
Have sex at a different time. Sexual dysfunction may be significantly higher two hours after a dose of medication and may be less problematic two hours before the next scheduled dose, so time your rendezvous accordingly. Or have morning sex: Testosterone levels are generally highest in the morning and decline throughout the day.
Add a sexual enhancer. Some medications can improve excitement by increasing either desire or blood flow. In the case of erectile disorder, for example, a physician may prescribe a medication such as Viagra, or in the case of low desire he or she may recommend a drug like Wellbutrin. It may sound a little strange to deal with the sexual side effects of one drug by adding another, but under the supervision of a physician who is familiar with your medical history, drugs can be combined in creative ways.
Focus on diet and exercise. Your lifestyle and overall fitness plays a big role in your sexual health. For example, many people end up gaining weight once they go on an SSRI antidepressant, which also contributes to low libido and erectile disorder.

Dealing with sexual side effects can be tricky and frustrating, but the point is to not just give up. Go on the web and do some research. Be proactive in communicating with your doctor and your partner. Try new things in the bedroom. When you have to say “yes” to drugs, don’t say “no” to sex.

Too Old To Hold

2011-04-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

Slate Magazine
Science

The mystery of gerontophilia.
By Jesse Bering
April 5, 2011

Perhaps it's just an artifact of having close, affectionate relationships with both of my grandmothers—one of whom was gnarled by debilitating rheumatoid arthritis but was as sage as a Nirvana-bound monk, the other of whom led a flapper-esque alcoholic lifestyle and was clever, mischievous, and wickedly funny—but I've always found elderly women rather endearing. Just as chubby, doe-eyed infants and the smell of baby powder bring out the maternal part of my androgynous personality, the Loris-like gait of an aged spinster redolent with ancient perfume elicits in me a similar strain of docility. On more than one occasion I have been tempted to reach out and hug a lonely old widow making her way slowly down the grocery-store aisle. Yet it is safe to say that, while I am not immune to other curious sexual rumblings from time to time, I have never been titillated by an octogenarian. (Since I'm a gay man, I should add that this applies to the penis-bearing elderly, too. I never really knew my grandfathers, though, so the inbound anecdote wasn't quite as fitting.)

There certainly are individuals for whom the elderly are equated, quite strongly, with the erotic, and it's these fascinating, little-known souls—referred to in the clinical scientific literature as gerontophiles—to whom we shall now turn. Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his classic 1886 book on sexual deviancy, Psycopathia Sexualis, first described this particular "erotic age orientation." His definition was brief and nonspecific, describing gerontophilia simply as "the love of persons of advanced age." Krafft-Ebing offers the case study of a 29-year-old man who reportedly found sex with "old women" pleasurable after being seduced by one when he was a teenager.

In nosological terms, precise definitions are exceedingly important, however, since younger persons' perceptions of "old" may vary; it's unclear in such cases if we're talking about, say, Sex and the City-old or Golden Girls-old. In a 2005 review of gerontophilia, British psychiatrist Hadrian Ball shows how the definition has sharpened, if only a tad, since Krafft-Ebing's days. For example, in 1981, the American sexologist John Money defined gerontophilia as:

The condition in which a young adult is dependent on the actuality or fantasy of erotosexual activity with a much older partner in order to initiate and maintain arousal and facilitate or achieve orgasm.

Ball laments this continued obtuseness in defining how old is old, exactly, when it comes to certifiable gerontophilia. So he clarifies that by "elderly," the clinical insinuation should be an erotic target aged 60 or more years. This is helpful, indeed, because it emphasizes that the particular sexual orientation is not so much in line with our fetish du jour of a cougar subculture—which, in everyday parlance, implies a libidinous middle-aged woman soliciting the attention of a much younger man. Rather, in sheer chronological terms, gerontophiles are perhaps better thought of as being closer to necrophiles than cougar-hunters. The same applies for women (or men) who prefer old men as partners: While a conventional "silver fox" in his 40s or 50s may be a bit long in the tooth, true gerontophiles are more likely to find themselves with someone who has no teeth.

It would be a major understatement to say that scientific research on gerontophilia is scant compared to the study of other paraphilias, but scattered references do exist. In 1929, a psychiatrist by the name of "A. Kutzinski" published a brief case study in Psychiatry and Neurology. The author writes about his gerontophile patient:

At the age of 24 he married, and he had six children; he served in the army during the war. Following complete sexual abstinence for over a year, he encountered, while bathing, an elderly woman with whom he had sexual relations. He lost all love for his wife, showing instead outspoken erotic impulses toward elderly women, which were so compulsive that they rendered work impossible.

In terms of the actual prevalence of gerontophiles, there is no known figure, or even an ongoing attempt to find one (at least so far as I can gather). Unlike pedophilia (peak attraction to prepubescent children), hebephilia (peak attraction to early pubescent-aged children) ephebophilia (peak attraction to adolescents) and teleiophilia (peak attraction to reproductive-aged adults), gerontophilia has not been explored systematically using sexological laboratory techniques—penile plethysmographs, clitoral stimulation measurements, and so forth—that are capable of assessing precise strength of genital arousal to images, sounds, and stories depicting differently-aged characters.

Ball points out that there is absolutely no mention of gerontophilia in either of Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues' most famous works (Sexuality in the Human Male, 1948, and Sexuality in the Human Female, 1951). Kinsey certainly wasn't shy about discussing other stigmatized sexual proclivities, such as bestiality and pedophilia, so this is an interesting omission in his works. Neither is there any specific mention of gerontophilia in the clinician's diagnostic bible, the DSM-IV—odd, since, within psychiatric circles, it is at least implicitly conceptualized as a distinct type of sexual deviancy, especially when it involves elder abuse. "The lack of any specific recording of gerontophilia within classification systems is probably significant," writes Ball:

Other sexual states are independently mentioned; examples include exhibitionism, voyeurism, pedophilia and sadomasochism. It can be deduced that the absence of the term gerontophilia is an indication that the condition does not typically present itself to mental health clinicians as a major clinical problem demanding a solution.

In other words, the population-level occurrence of gerontophilia appears to be miniscule by comparison with that of the other erotic age orientations. There are multiple ways to interpret this ostensible infrequency of the phenomenon. First, it is possible that gerontophilia is more common than we realize; unlike pedophiles, individuals who find themselves aroused principally by the elderly may be viewed as unusual, and certainly confusing, but they are not seen as criminals. Thus, cases of gerontophilia simply may not come to light as often as other erotic age orientations. From a lawyer's perspective, for example, Harold's relationship with Maude was perfectly legal—grist for the gossip mill, but that's about it. Humbert's relationship with Lolita, by contrast, was a criminal affair. Another way to interpret the dearth of gerontophiles, however, and one that makes more theoretical sense, is that it runs against the evolutionary grain. It's not terribly difficult to understand why the average person would become more intensely aroused by a bland coed than a hoary siren. There's the obvious problem with reproduction and menopause, which contradicts our evolved (if unconscious) interest in passing along our genes. The same logic suggests there wouldn't be many "true" pedophiles around, either. Indeed, recent findings suggest that pedophilia, for its part, is much less common than hebephilia or ephebophila.

Yet as unusual and counterintuitive as gerontophilia may be, the pornography industry reminds us—as it so often does—that there is a niche following for just about any form of love. Whether it's genuine gerontophiles who gravitate to these fetish websites or, perhaps more likely, puerile peeping toms with a fleeting carnival curiosity, is impossible to say. But there are at least two fairly "popular" dating websites catering to connoisseurs of the aged, one for straight men (www.nannydate.co.uk) and one—definitely NSFW—for gay men (www.silverdaddies.com). Even these specialized dating websites, however, do not appear to include many admirers of the most senior of senior citizens, but instead are laden with a common vernacular ("mature," "experienced") to connote a primary interest in late middle-age. From a clinical perspective, those with a sexual dependency on cougars, nannies, MILFs, DILFs, silver daddies, and so on would be lumped together under the normative category of teleiophiles, but it is interesting to note that this umbrella group could, in principle, be subdivided further still into even more discrete erotic age orientations through the same physiological measurements discussed earlier.

Literary erotica featuring elderly characters is mostly nonexistent as well; when they do appear in fiction, they're more likely, as Ball points out, to occur in the horror genre. In the short story Awake, Sleeping Tigress (1972), by Norman Kaufman, the narrator is a nauseated 23-year-old fugitive who's been blackmailed by his lecherous 100-year-old landlady into having sex with her:

I looked at her as a sick loathing constricted my throat: I looked at the thin white hair and the sunken cheeks and the toothless mouth; at the flat chest and obscene swollen belly and the fleshless flanks. I moved towards her, found myself touching the mottled body, felt the stink of the dirt in my nostrils, felt the bile in my mouth as the veined arms encircled me …

One man's worst nightmare is another's wet dream, however, and, rare though they may be, we've established that gerontophiles do indeed exist, even toward the extreme end of the age spectrum. Let's take at face value this Reddit thread, for example, in which the fit 32-year-old poster outs himself as a "gay gerontophile" and invites honest questions from the curious. He claims that he is financially secure and that there are no monetary incentives to his taste for heavyset men 60 and above, that he became aware of his predilections for this abundant demographic—one respondent remarks cheekily to the gerontophile that "the world is your oyster!"—at the age of 15, and that the oldest partner he'd ever happily copulated with was a 77-year-old man. The sparse scientific literature focuses exclusively on male gerontophiles like him; that could be because female gerontophiles don't actually exist. Yet maybe, just maybe, we've all been a bit hasty in judging women like Anna Nichole Smith (who at 26 married wheelchair-bound, 89-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall) and Crystal Harris (24-year-old fiancée of a still-peppy, 84-year-old Hugh Hefner). Nah.

The whole subject, of course, is bound to unleash a torrent of crude jokes, but there are some sobering considerations regarding the safety and well-being of vulnerable adults. In a 2007 report in Aggression and Violent Behavior, Ann Burgess and her colleagues report several case studies involving sexual abuse of the elderly. Although many such cases are opportunistic (occurring, for example, without premeditation in the context of a robbery) or symptomatic of the perpetrator's more generalized sexual sadism, a slim minority do appear to involve individuals who specifically target their victims because of their advanced age. The authors describe the case of a 33-year-old nursing-home assistant who'd been quietly molesting and raping his female charges for several years. Some of this man's victims were rounding the epochal century mark and were suffering from dementia, thus his defense was that they were "not aware of what was happening."

The abuse might have continued in silence, had not the shrewd daughter of a 98-year-old woman deduced foul play by noticing that her mom became uncharacteristically frightened whenever the elder-molesting aide came into the room. Ball also reviews forensic data revealing that, in the U.K., somewhere between 2 and 7 percent of all rape victims are over the age of 60.

Elder sexual abuse is reprehensible, of course; but from a bloodless moral philosophical perspective, it does raise intriguing questions about issues related to consent, trauma, and the impact of sex crimes on victims with different psychological and physical stakes. Is the rape of a 98-year-old Alzheimer's patient—who, whether we like it or not, has only a limited awareness of what is happening, just as the perpetrator says—comparable to, say, the rape of a lucid, vulnerable child who would have to deal with the emotional scars of such sexual violence for the rest of his or her long life, or a teenager who might be impregnated?

It should be stressed that there is no link between violence and gerontophilia, and in fact at least some gerontophiles appear especially concerned with the well-being and safety of their erotic targets. A self-confessed "straight gerontophile" on another Reddit thread writes this, for example, in response to queries about the physical logistics of making love to an elderly woman:

So far as worrying about injuring them, I do worry. Very much so. For that reason I usually let her lead the way, I figure she knows her limitations better than I do. But obviously I don't toss any woman I'm with around like a rag doll. As fun as that might be if she's into it, a broken hip would put a downer on things.

The etiology, or psychosexual origins, of developing such a taste for aged flesh is presently unknown. Not surprisingly, earlier theories tended to highlight Oedipal influences, with gerontophiliac males said to be expressing some form of repressed carnal desire for their own mothers (or grandmothers). John Money, however, pushed aside the Freudian psychoanalysis and instead postulated a hazy, unrefined model of sexual imprinting, in which sexual experiences with significantly older adults stamp on the individual's brain an erotic fixation on this type of age disparity.

In a 1992 issue of the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, Ball describes a case that touches on both theoretical perspectives. A 17-year-old male who'd been sentenced to youth custody after trailing elderly women into elevators and assaulting them, reported that at the age of 12, his mother "displayed herself to him and played with his penis." By 16, he realized he could not maintain an erection by fantasizing about girls his own age, but only by masturbating to imaginary (much) older women. His ideal partner, he said, would possess the following characteristics: "face would be old, hair going grey, normal or fat."

Perhaps the oddest theory regarding gerontophilia was the one put forth—without any supporting data—by British psychiatrist T. C. Gibbens in 1982. This inventive author thought that gerontophiles are likely to have underlying pedophiliac tendencies as well, both paraphilias stemming from a phobia of pubic hair. Brushing off the pubic-hair issue, an article from earlier this year in The Lancet does describe the case of three individuals who, on pre-admission to a nursing home, "appeared as frail, nice elderly men." It wasn't long before these men began taking egregious sexual liberties with their co-residents, "massaging the breasts or buttocks of the most frail women," "committing sodomy," and "making rude gestures." Intriguingly, in their earlier lives, two of these men had served jail time for child molestation and, though he wasn't prosecuted, the third man was thought to have molested his nephews. Whether such individuals are pedophiles, gerontophiles, or simply those that would take sexual advantage of vulnerable people, is unclear. It's important to recall that gerontophiles are dependent on having an elderly sexual partner to achieve orgasm, not simply that they are willing to make love to a senior citizen.

Alas, from the perspective of psychiatry, gerontophilia is the youngest of all the paraphilias, and remains a great enigma.
Jesse Bering is an evolutionary psychologist and director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at the Queen's University, Belfast. His new book, The Belief Instinct, will be published in February (available as The God Instinct in the United Kingdom). He also writes the column "Bering in Mind" for Scientific American and is currently working on a book about human sexuality. His Web site is www.jessebering.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2290515/

To the brain, getting burned, getting dumped feels the same

2011-03-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

(Health.com) -- Science has finally confirmed what anyone who's ever been in love already knows: Heartbreak really does hurt.

In a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that the same brain networks that are activated when you're burned by hot coffee also light up when you think about a lover who has spurned you.

In other words, the brain doesn't appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain. Heartache and painful breakups are "more than just metaphors," says Ethan Kross, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.

Health.com: How to keep chronic pain from straining your friendships

The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, illuminates the role that feelings of rejection and other emotional trauma can play in the development of chronic pain disorders such as fibromyalgia, Kross says. And, he adds, it raises interesting questions about whether treating physical pain can help to relieve emotional pain, and vice versa.

"What's exciting about these findings," he says, "is that they outline the direct way in which emotional experiences can be linked to the body."

Kross and his colleagues recruited 21 women and 19 men who had no history of chronic pain or mental illness but who had all been dumped by a romantic partner within the previous six months. The volunteers underwent fMRI scans -- which measure brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow -- during two painful tasks.

Health.com: 6 mistakes pain patients make

In the first, a heat source strapped to each subject's left arm created physical pain akin to "holding a hot cup of coffee without the sleeve," Kross says. In the second, the volunteers were asked to look at photos of their lost loves and were prompted to remember specific experiences they shared with that person.

Other fMRI research has examined how social rejection manifests in the brain, but this study was the first to show that rejection can elicit a response in two brain areas associated with physical pain: the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula. Those brain regions may have lit up in this study but not others because the rejection his volunteers experienced was unusually intense, Kross says.

Although Kross stresses that the study is "very much a first step" in understanding the connection between physical and emotional pain, the findings may help chronic pain patients grasp that emotions can affect their physical condition, says psychologist Judith Scheman, Ph.D., director of the chronic pain rehabilitation program at the Cleveland Clinic.

Health.com: Is chronic pain ruining your relationship?

Past traumas can make people more sensitive to pain and thus more susceptible to disorders like fibromyalgia, which causes both chronic pain and fatigue, Scheman says. She and her staff encourage pain patients to "explore their emotional trauma and baggage," but many are reluctant to do so.

"As a clinician, I like studies like this because patients often don't understand why they have to do painful emotional work," Scheman continues. "Showing them something like this helps them understand that there is science behind what I am asking them to do."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/28/burn.heartbreak.same.to.brain/index.html?hpt=C2

Birthday-suit therapist Sarah White conducts naked therapy sessions for troubled New Yorkers

2011-03-07T15:59:00.001-08:00

Birthday-suit therapist Sarah White conducts naked therapy sessions for troubled New Yorkers

BY Rich Schapiro
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
http://tinyurl.com/4r8hjw9

Wednesday, March 2nd 2011, 4:00 AM
Sarah White, a 24-year-old psychology buff, conducts therapy sessions during which she progressively removes her clothing. Above, she counsels a News reporter about work-life balance.

Sarah White, a 24-year-old psychology buff, conducts therapy sessions during which she progressively removes her clothing. Above, she counsels a News reporter about work-life balance.

There's one sure way to get a man to bare his soul - get naked.

Sarah White, a 24-year-old psychology buff, conducts online therapy sessions in her birthday suit. The naked therapist's unique approach to helping people solve their issues has, she says, aroused interest from dozens of suffering New Yorkers.

"For men especially, who are less likely than women to go to therapy, it is more interesting, more enticing, more exciting," said White. "It's a more inspiring approach to therapy."

White begins her sessions with her clothes on. But as the hour-long appointments heat up, she gradually sheds all of her duds until there's nothing left to take off.

"Freud used free association," she said. "I use nakedness."

The initial sessions, which cost $150, are conducted via a one-way Web cam and text chat. Once she develops a rapport with a client, she'll move on to two-way video appointments via Skype and even in-person consultations.

White said her roughly 30 clients are an eclectic mix of college students with sexual issues, middle-aged men with relationship problems and even a couple of women who just enjoy chatting with a nude peer.

Clients schedule appointments through her website, sarahwhitelive.com.

A freelance computer programmer, White said she got the idea to perform therapy sessions in the nude after being uninspired by the theories she learned as an undergraduate psychology student. She conceded that naked therapy is not approved by any mental health association. And she is not a licensed therapist.

White demonstrated her less-is-more style yesterday, slowly peeling off layers of clothing as she counseled a Daily News reporter on seeking a better work/life balance.

"It sounds like you're not sure if this is really a problem," White said shortly before removing her teal bra.

While White's boyfriend supports her new business, her parents are still in the dark.

"I should probably tell them before they read it in the paper," said White, of the upper West Side.

Not surprisingly, professional psychologists are not sold.

"She's using the word therapy here, but I don't consider this therapy," said Diana Kirschner, a New York-based clinical psychologist. "I consider this interactive soft-core Internet porn."

Kuamell Johnson, 31, said he'd love to experience a therapy session with White, but he's not sure he'd be able to stay on topic.

"She starts to strip, now she's butt naked," pondered Johnson, a messenger from Brooklyn. "It's going to throw my concentration off."rschapiro@nydailynews.com

Funeral for coffin dwellers dying to live (Suicidal people in Seoul volunteer to be 'buried alive' in effort to regain will to live)

2011-02-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

By Paula Hancocks, CNN

Seoul (CNN) -- Kim Byong-soo steps out of his shoes and into his coffin. He slowly lies down and closes his eyes. It is minus 11 degrees Celsius in these South Korean woods, but Kim doesn't seem to feel it. His hands and feet are tied. Only then does he open his eyes as the lid is closed and hammered down.

This "death" is Kim's last chance to regain his will to live.

For 15 years, this highly successful Seoul-based dentist has wanted to kill himself. "Every day I want to turn a gun on myself," he says. "Every moment I'm awake. I think about suicide daily but I can't do it because I have too many responsibilities."

Kim enrolled in the Beautiful Life seminar with the hope it will change his mind. It's a radical technique to help people forge a fresh outlook on life and its founder Kim Giho says that only by dying can some people find their desire to live.

"We can't understand death simply by talking about it. People truly experience death by participating in it and being reborn with a pure state of mind." Kim Giho tries to demystify death by talking about it directly with the group.

As part of his treatment, the dentist has to write a suicide letter, his final words to his wife and children. Writing by candle-light, Kim scribbles furiously.

Earlier he said of his wife: "She knows that I'm having a hard time, but she doesn't know that I want to kill myself and I don't ask her for help. If I do, it will be too hard for her."

Kim is then dressed in traditional burial clothes -- loose fitting hemp cloth -- and taken out into the snow. Along with five others in the group, he is led by a man dressed in black, symbolizing death.

In a small badly lit clearing in a wooded area of Seoul, six coffins have been laid out. Kim kneels next to his, lowers his head and listens as a final prayer is given. This is his funeral.

Then, in silence, he steps into the wooden coffin and lies down. Kim Byong-soo stays in the coffin, seeing and hearing nothing, for 20 minutes.

Kim Giho says this sense of being 'buried alive' can reboot a suicidal mind. He tells me some people re-emerge into the fresh air with tears streaming down their faces, promising a determination to live every day to the full.

When Kim rises from his coffin, there are no tears and he says nothing.

Once back inside the seminar room he re-reads his suicide letter intently. He adds to his letter to his wife and children and tells the group: "Starting tomorrow, I don't want to be that person who just used to eat and work to get by. I want to love others, know how to forgive others and have hope."

Talking about his wife, he says: "Whatever you want I will do it for you."

Just hours after saying that he wants to die, Kim is making plans to take his wife on a holiday.

Allergic to orgasms? Man's sad story has happy ending

2011-01-21T10:42:00.000-08:00

Brian Alexander 01.21.2011

Poor Mr. A! He’s a 50-year-old married man, who, since the age of 19, has been plagued with a litany of unpleasant ailments every time he ejaculates.

On cue, after any orgasm, the beleaguered man would experience fever, weakness, exhaustion, loss of initiative, headache, disordered speech, irritability, forgetfulness and frightening dreams, not to mention swollen lips and throat.

The symptoms were so severe that he and his wife planned intercourse for Fridays so he’d have two days to recover before returning to work on Monday. He also suffered from premature ejaculation, so the problem was no picnic for Mrs. A, either. It’s a miracle they had two children.

We know all this because Mr. A’s condition is detailed in a just-published paper in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in which Dutch doctors describe what they call Post Orgasmic Illness Syndrome, or POIS.

POIS was first identified by the same team of doctors in 2002. Initially it was thought the cause might be psychological, possibly related to a syndrome called “dhat” that is sometimes reported among men in India and Sri Lanka that leaves them fearful of ejaculating.

Then, doctors in the United Kingdom noted similar symptoms in two men, including one whose problem improved dramatically by taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs just before and for two days after ejaculating. That seemed to indicate the problem was caused by some sort of immune system reaction.

The Dutch doctors figured POIS might lie in a man’s reaction to his own semen. They conducted skin prick testing, a common way to test for allergies, on 33 of the 45 men they’ve identified with potential POIS so far. When the men were exposed to their own semen this way, 29 of them had classic allergic reactions. Mr. A was one.

They tried treating him the way allergists sometimes treat food allergies, with “hyposensitization,” a technique that uses the allergen itself to treat the condition.

The doctors began a long series of treatments, first diluting the semen 40,000 times, inoculating him with it, and then, over a period of 31 months, gradually working up to a dilution of 1-to-20.

Amazingly, it worked. Mr. A eventually was able to ejaculate without debilitating illness. His symptoms did not disappear entirely, but they were much milder and lasted only a short time. Lead author Marcel Waldinger, of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosexology at Haga Hospital in The Hague, said the results “contradict the idea that the complaints have a psychological cause.”

That’s good to know, but why, we may ask, is Mr. A allergic to his own semen at all? Women have been known to have allergic reactions to men’s emissions, but that’s entirely different.

Scientists aren’t sure, but they believe that a gap in the seminal plumbing somehow allows the semen to contact immune cells called T-lymphocytes which, in turn, sets off immune system alarm bells. With repeated exposure, the reaction becomes intense.

Whatever the cause, Mr. A is relieved that his problem has eased. Doctors report he is now “quite contented” at both home and work.

As a side benefit, the premature ejaculation stopped, too, so we can only surmise that Mrs. A is content as well.

Why Does Schizophrenia Appear in Young Adults?

2011-01-09T20:57:00.001-08:00

Recent research explores the effects of a schizophrenia risk factor (DISC1) and its influence over the onset of the disease

By Christie Nicholson
Saturday, February 27, 2010

Schizophrenia typically shows up in young adults. For men it tends to emerge around 20 to 28 years and peak onset for women is between 26 to 32 years. But what triggers the disease during this time? Well past studies have shown that mutations in a gene called DISC1 are linked to schizophrenia. DISC1 enables a guide to new nerve cells—sort of like a traffic cop—sending them to the right place to make the right connections to other cells. But recently, researchers partially shut off DISC1 in lab mice to see what happens when there is no traffic cop. And what they saw is a steady decrease in the size and number of dendritic spines, the tiny branches of the nerve cell that receive messages from nearby cells. Their results are published in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience. Connections between cells are constantly broken and forged throughout our lives but there’s an amazingly large amount of so-called “pruning” during adolescence. So if this breaking of connections goes awry, as it does when DISC1 is shut off, then one might be at high risk for schizophrenia. And so while the defective gene may be there at birth, its effect does not show up until many years into one’s life, post adolescence in young adulthood.

Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage

2011-01-05T19:50:00.000-08:00

By BENEDICT CAREY

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

“It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”

The editor of the journal, Charles Judd, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, said the paper went through the journal’s regular review process. “Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript,” he said, “and these are very trusted people.”

All four decided that the paper met the journal’s editorial standards, Dr. Judd added, even though “there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results.”

But many experts say that is precisely the problem. Claims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence. Neglecting to take this into account — as conventional social science analyses do — makes many findings look far more significant than they really are, these experts say.

“Several top journals publish results only when these appear to support a hypothesis that is counterintuitive or attention-grabbing,” Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, wrote by e-mail. “But such a hypothesis probably constitutes an extraordinary claim, and it should undergo more scrutiny before it is allowed to enter the field.”

Dr. Wagenmakers is co-author of a rebuttal to the ESP paper that is scheduled to appear in the same issue of the journal.

In an interview, Dr. Bem, the author of the original paper and one of the most prominent research psychologists of his generation, said he intended each experiment to mimic a well-known classic study, “only time-reversed.”

In one classic memory experiment, for example, participants study 48 words and then divide a subset of 24 of them into categories, like food or animal. The act of categorizing reinforces memory, and on subsequent tests people are more likely to remember the words they practiced than those they did not.

In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they did the categorizing — and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words,” the paper concludes.

In another experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

In recent weeks science bloggers, researchers and assorted skeptics have challenged Dr. Bem’s methods and his statistics, with many critiques digging deep into the arcane but important fine points of crunching numbers. (Others question his intentions. “He’s got a great sense of humor,” said Dr. Hyman, of Oregon. “I wouldn’t rule out that this is an elaborate joke.”)

Dr. Bem has generally responded in kind, sometimes accusing critics of misunderstanding his paper, others times of building a strong bias into their own re-evaluations of his data.

In one sense, it is a historically familiar pattern. For more than a century, researchers have conducted hundreds of tests to detect ESP, telekinesis and other such things, and when such studies have surfaced, skeptics have been quick to shoot holes in them.

But in another way, Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance.

Peer review is usually an anonymous process, with authors and reviewers unknown to one another. But all four reviewers of this paper were social psychologists, and all would have known whose work they were checking and would have been responsive to the way it was reasoned.

Perhaps more important, none were topflight statisticians. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.”

Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis.

In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,” in the words of Jeffrey N. Rouder, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who, with Richard D. Morey of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has also submitted a critique of Dr. Bem’s paper to the journal.

Physics and biology, among other disciplines, overwhelmingly suggest that Dr. Bem’s experiments have not changed those odds, Dr. Rouder said.

So far, at least three efforts to replicate the experiments have failed. But more are in the works, Dr. Bem said, adding, “I have received hundreds of requests for the materials” to conduct studies.

Anger at God common, even among atheists

2011-01-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

By: Elizabeth Landau - CNN.com Health Writer/Producer

If you're angry at your doctor, your boss, your relative or your spouse, you can probably sit down and have a productive conversation about it. God, on the other hand, is probably not available to chat.

And yet people get angry at God all the time, especially about everyday disappointments, finds a new set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

It's not just religious folks, either. People unaffiliated with organized religion, atheists and agnostics also report anger toward God either in the past, or anger focused on a hypothetical image - that is, what they imagined God might be like - said lead study author Julie Exline, Case Western Reserve University psychologist.

In studies on college students, atheists and agnostics reported more anger at God during their lifetimes than believers. A separate study also found this pattern among bereaved individuals. This phenomenon is something Exline and colleagues will explore more in future research, which is open to more participants.

It seems that more religious people are less likely to feel angry at God and more likely to see his intentions as well-meaning, Exline's research found.

And younger people tend to be angrier at God than older people, Exline said. She says some of the reasons she's seen people the angriest at God include rejection from preferred colleges and sports injuries preventing high schoolers from competing.

The age difference may have to do with cultural norms, she said. Perhaps previous generations were taught to not question God, whereas younger people today don't have any qualms about it. On the other hand, it might be that as people get older, they learn how to handle these types of feelings better.

Anger at God can strongly resemble feelings you may have against another person, Exline found. God may seem treacherous or cruel when bad things happen, just like another individual might. Your anger may fester even more when there's no good reason for the negative event, such as a natural disaster or a disease, to occur. And strong, longstanding negative emotions of any kind can lead to physical ailments.

Moreover, distress at God is associated with mental health symptoms. Exline and colleagues found that among cancer survivors interviewed once and then again a year later, those who were angry at God at both points in time had the poorest mental and physical health. But the study cannot prove whether anger at God made them feel worse or that feeling worse made them more angry at God.

Just like with people in your life, you can respect and feel anger toward God at the same time. And you can move toward forgiveness by reframing the way you view the negative event: Perhaps God was not responsible for it or that he acted in that way for a reason.

"When people trust that God cares about them and has positive intentions toward them, even if they can’t understand what those intentions or meanings are, it tends to help to resolve anger," she said.

Granted, these studies aren't definitive; they are steps forward in this emerging field of inquiry and not the final word on the subject.

But we see it in the real world, too. Jeff Crim listens to people's anger at God all the time - specifically, people who are dying. He's a chaplain and bereavement coordinator North Star Hospice in Calhoun, Georgia, and has found that it's important to find a way to express your anger at God in order to deal with it.

Expressing anger can be cathartic, and help you move on, but how you do it is deeply personal, Crim said. Crim himself will speak aloud to God, but others find solace in a trusted spiritual leader or other person to confide in about their anger at a higher power.

"What they need is a safe place to express their anger, to know that their anger has been heard and listened to," he said.

SAD: When seasons change how you feel

2011-01-03T08:35:00.001-08:00

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

(CNN) -- By 10 a.m. every day during the winters, Rachelle Strauss felt like she could go back to bed. She used to be a morning person, but that all changed about 10 years ago when she started to feel exhausted as the darkest days dragged on.

"As soon as March came 'round and we hit spring, I was back to my bouncy self. It's almost like being two people for two different seasons of the year," said Strauss, 38, of Gloucestershire, England.

Strauss is not alone. In Northern Europe, an estimated 12 million people suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Over here in the United States, about 4% to 6% of the population may have it, but 10% to 20% might have milder winter blues, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

The condition tends to strike mainly women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, although men can also have it. Children and adolescents may also develop it, and it is less common in adults of older ages.

Seasonal affective disorder can be expected in regions of the world that are farther away from the equator and thus experience seasonal changes in daylight hours more dramatically, said Simon Rego, psychologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.

Scientists aren't sure why some people get seasonal affective disorder and others don't. One theory is that sufferers may have a biological predisposition to it, and the symptoms get triggered in particular ways.

Symptoms of SAD

For Strauss, the symptoms of lack of energy and depression formed a vicious cycle, where she wouldn't exercise or socialize, and then became irritable and cranky.

"I got depressed because I couldn't do the things I wanted to do," she said. "Certainly this total exhaustion is very debilitating after awhile."

Alison Kero of Denver, Colorado, can relate. Before moving from New York, her energy dropped off in the winter, and she would go to sleep at 6 p.m.

Anxiety, suicidal thoughts and poor concentration can also accompany seasonal affective disorder, said Dr. Tracy Latz, psychiatrist in Mooresville, North Carolina.

A hallmark of the condition is that symptoms get worse when daylight saving time ends. If you're feeling down fairly consistently for two weeks or more, and the feelings recur during the same time every year, there's reason to suspect that it's seasonal affective disorder, she said.

More rarely, seasonal affective disorder can flare up with warm, sunny weather. In these people, anxiety, insomnia and irritability can worsen in the spring and summer. And others exhibit a form of bipolar disorder called "reverse seasonal affective disorder," with hyperactivity, agitation and inappropriate enthusiasm in the spring and summer.

When it's not necessarily SAD

For the patients whose moods suffer in the summertime, there may be longstanding issues contributing to the problem, such as bad childhood memories of staying at home when school let out, Latz said.

"If we came to dread a certain time of the year every year as kids because of our family dynamics or the environment that we were in, then we can carry that into this subconscious dread of that time of the year," she said.

Personal experiences are a major component of how the seasons can influence how you feel, said Dr. John Sharp, author of "The Emotional Calendar." Anyone, regardless of whether they have seasonal affective disorder, may get into particular moods because of environmental, psychological and cultural forces that occur at various times of the year.

If you once had an amazing experience one year in the early part of December, you'll likely feel positively when seasonal changes such as snow, crackling fireplaces and hot chocolate bring back those good memories.

The anniversary of a major loss, on the other hand, can throw a dark cloud over any time of year. Sharp noted that Mark Madoff, son of convicted Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, took his own life on December 10, the two-year anniversary of his father's arrest.

Cultural norms can also drive seasonal changes in mood, he said. It has been documented that there are peaks in suicides in the spring. The reason for that has not been pinned down.

Sharp posits that as the days get longer, many people tend to appear more active and carefree, which makes sufferers of depression feel worse. The cultural experiences of the winter holidays can also be a burden for adults, with the stress of family gatherings, whereas for children they were times of joy.

What are the treatments?

Seasonal affective disorder has to do primarily with environment; specifically, how much light you're getting. That's why one of most iconic therapies for seasonal affective disorder is the light box.

Light therapy imitates light from the outdoors and triggers changes in the brain that can help elevate mood. It doesn't work for everyone, but many people such as Strauss have found relief from sitting in front of a bright light box. Strauss uses hers during breakfast, and it helps her get through the day. There are also dawn simulators, which mimic the sunrise as you wake up, and light visors that look like baseball caps that you can wear to get light exposure.

Since moving to Denver, which tends to see more sun than New York, Kero feels like she doesn't have to use her light box anymore, but 15 to 30 minutes a day did help her back East.

"It's a deep biological reality that our brains sense the amount of sunlight we're exposed to with great sensitivity. It adds up to become a big drain when we don't have enough light," Sharp said.

But light therapy doesn't work for everyone.

Some people need medications that depression patients would receive: anti-depressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Anxiety, suicidal thoughts and poor concentration because of excessive worry are all signs that there could be an issue with serotonin, a brain chemical involved in mood, Latz said.

Lack of energy is a sign of a problem with the brain's levels of dopamine, another brain chemical, she said. Exercise can help stimulate this system and help you feel more awake.

In mild cases, certain nutrients and herbs may help. Omega-3 fatty acids have been shown to relieve some symptoms of anxiety, Latz said, which are found in oily fish. The American College of Physicians considers St. John's wort an option for mild depression, but be aware it can interact with many drugs and might cause oversensitivity to light. Strauss, whose website Little Green Blog discusses natural remedies, recommends uplifting essential oils such as lavender. Kero suggests surrounding yourself with positive people.

And if there are issues you're having besides the weather, try talking to a mental health professional. Cognitive behavioral therapy is one form of talk therapy that can help you confront negative thought patterns.

"Obviously if there's something to talk about, if you're having frustrations with some aspect of life, counseling is quite good as a potential way forward," Sharp said.

Seek help if you're entertaining suicidal thoughts and feeling like life isn't worth living. Call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-784-2433 if you need immediate assistance.

Slipping the 'Cognitive Straitjacket' of Psychiatric Diagnosis

2010-12-29T21:22:00.001-08:00

Psychiatry's diagnostic bible meets the awkward facts of genetics
By Steven E. Hyman |

It can fairly be said that modern psychiatric diagnosis was “born” in a 1970 paper on schizophrenia.

The authors, Washington University psychiatry professors Eli Robins and Samuel B. Guze, rejected the murky psychoanalytic diagnostic formulations of their time. Instead, they embraced a medical model inspired by the careful 19th-century observational work of Emil Kraepelin, long overlooked during the mid-20th-century dominance of Freudian theory. Mental disorders were now to be seen as distinct categories, much as different bacterial and viral infections produce characteristic diseases that can be seen as distinct “natural kinds.”

Disorders, Robins and Guze argued, should be defined based on phenomenology: clinical descriptions validated by long-term follow-up to demonstrate the stability of the diagnosis over time. With scientific progress, they expected fuller validation of mental disorders to derive from laboratory findings and studies of familial transmission.

This descriptive approach to psychiatric diagnosis -- based on lists of symptoms, their timing of onset, and the duration of illness -- undergirded the American Psychiatric Association’s widely disseminated and highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, first published in 1980. Since then, the original “DSM-III” has yielded two relatively conservative revisions, and right now, the DSM-5 is under construction. Sadly, it is clear that the optimistic predictions of Robins and Guze have not been realized.

Four decades after their seminal paper, there are still no widely validated laboratory tests for any common mental illness. Worse, an enormous number of family and genetic studies have not only failed to validate the major DSM disorders as natural kinds, but instead have suggested that they are more akin to chimaeras. Unfortunately for the multitudes stricken with mental illness, the brain has not given up its secrets easily.

That is not to say that we have made no progress. DNA research has begun to illuminate the complex genetics of mental illness. But what it tells us, I would argue, is that, at least for the purposes of research, the current DSM diagnoses do not work. They are too narrow, too rigid, altogether too limited. Reorganization of the DSM is hardly a panacea, but science cannot thrive if investigators are forced into a cognitive straitjacket.

Before turning to the scientific evidence of fundamental problems with the DSM, let’s first take note of an important problem that the classification has produced for clinicians and patients alike: An individual who receives a single DSM diagnosis very often meets criteria for multiple additional diagnoses (so-called co-occurrence or “comorbidity”), and the pattern of diagnoses often changes over the lifespan. Thus, for example, children and adolescents with a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder often manifest major depression in their later teens or twenties. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders often receive additional diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tic disorders.

Of course, there are perfectly reasonable explanations for comorbidity. One disorder could be a risk factor for another just as tobacco smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer. Alternatively, common diseases in a population could co-occur at random. The problem with the DSM is that many diagnoses co-occur at frequencies far higher than predicted by their population prevalence, and the timing of co-occurrence suggests that one disorder is not likely to be causing the second. For patients, it can be confusing and demoralizing to receive multiple and shifting diagnoses; this phenomenon certainly does not increase confidence in their caregivers.

Family studies and genetics shed light on the apparently high rate of co-occurrence of mental disorders and suggest that it is an artifact of the DSM itself. Genetic studies focused on finding variations in DNA sequences associated with mental disorders have repeatedly found shared genetic risks for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Other studies have found different sequence variations within the same genes to be associated with schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders.

An older methodology, the study of twins, continues to provide important insight into this muddy genetic picture. Twin studies generally compare the concordance for a disease or other trait within monozygotic twin pairs, who share 100% of their DNA, versus concordance within dizygotic twin pairs, who share on average 50% of their DNA. In a recent article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, a Swedish team of researchers led by Paul Lichtenstein studied 7,982 twin pairs. They found a heritability of 80% for autism spectrum disorders, but also found substantial sharing of genetic risk factors among autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, developmental coordination disorder, tic disorders, and learning disorders.

In another recent article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Marina Bornovalova and her University of Minnesota colleagues studied 1,069 pairs of 11-year-old twins and their biological parents. They found that parent-child resemblance was accounted for by shared genetic risk factors: in parents, they gave rise to conduct disorder, adult antisocial behavior, alcohol dependence, and drug dependence; in the 11-year-olds these shared factors were manifest as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, and oppositional-defiant disorder. (Strikingly, attention deficit disorder co-occurs in both the autism spectrum cluster and disruptive disorder cluster.)

These and many other studies call into question two of the key validators of descriptive psychiatry championed by Robins and Guze. First, DSM disorders do not breed true. What is transmitted across generations is not discrete DSM categories but, perhaps, complex patterns of risk that may manifest as one or more DSM disorders within a related cluster. Second, instead of long-term stability, symptom patterns often change over the life course, producing not only multiple co-occurring diagnoses but also different diagnoses at different times of life.

How can these assertions be explained? In fairness to Robins and Guze, they could not have imagined the extraordinary genetic complexity that produces the risk of many common human ills, including mental disorders. What this means is that common mental disorders appear to be due to different combinations of genes in different families, acting in combination with epigenetics -- gene expression varies even if the underlying DNA sequence is the same -- and non-genetic factors.

In some families, genetic risk for mental disorders seems to be due to many, perhaps hundreds, of small variations in DNA sequence -- often single “letters” in the DNA code. Each may cause a very small increment in risk, but, in infelicitous combinations, can lead to illness. In other families, there may be background genetic risk, but the coup de grace arrives in the form of a relatively large DNA deletion, duplication, or rearrangement. Such “copy number variants” may occur de novo in apparently sporadic cases of schizophrenia or autism.

In sum, it appears that no gene is either necessary or sufficient for risk of a common mental disorder. Finally, a given set of genetic risks may produce different symptoms depending on broad genetic background, early developmental influences, life stage, or diverse environmental factors.

The complex nature of genetic risk offers a possible explanation for comorbidity: what the DSM treats as discrete disorders, categorically separate from health and from each other, are not, in fact, discrete. Instead, schizophrenia, autism-spectrum disorders, certain anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mood disorders, and others represent families of related disorders with heterogeneous genetic risk factors underlying them. I would hypothesize that what is shared within disorder families, such as the autism spectrum or the obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum, are abnormalities in neural circuits that underlie different aspects of brain function, from cognition to emotion to behavioral control, and that these circuit abnormalities do not respect the narrow symptoms checklists within the DSM.

The first DSM had many important strengths, but I would argue that part of what went wrong with it was a fairly arbitrary decision: the promulgation of a large number of disorders, despite the early state of the science, and the conceptualization of each disorder as a distinct category. That decision eschewed the possibility that some diagnoses are better represented in terms of quantifiable dimensions, much like the diagnoses of hypertension and diabetes, which are based on measurements on numerical scales.

These fundamental missteps would not have proven so problematic but for the human tendency to treat anything with a name as if it is real. Thus, a scientifically pioneering diagnostic system that should have been treated as a set of testable hypotheses was instead virtually set in stone. DSM categories play a controlling role in clinical communication, insurance reimbursement, regulatory approval of new treatments, grant reviews, and editorial policies of journals. As I have argued elsewhere, the excessive reliance on DSM categories, which are poor mirrors of nature, has limited the scope and thus the utility of scientific questions that could be asked. We now face a knotty problem: how to facilitate science so that DSM-6 does not emerge a decade or two from now a trivially revised descendant of DSM-III, but without disrupting the substantial clinical and administrative uses to which the DSM system is put.

I believe that the most plausible mechanism for repairing this plane while it is still flying is to give new attention to overarching families of disorders, sometimes called meta-structure. In previous editions of the DSM, the chapters were almost an afterthought compared with the individual disorders. It should be possible, without changing the criteria for specific diagnoses, to create chapters of disorders that co-occur at very high rates and that appear to share genetic risk factors based on family, twin, and molecular genetic studies.

This will not be possible for the entire DSM-5, but it would be possible for certain neurodevelopmental disorders, anxiety disorders, the obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum, so-called externalizing or disruptive disorders (such as antisocial personality disorder and substance use disorders), and others. Scientists could then be invited by funding agencies and journals to be agnostic to the internal divisions within each large cluster, to ignore the over-narrow diagnostic categories. The resulting data could then yield a very different classification by the time the DSM-6 arrives.

Psychiatry has been overly optimistic about progress before, but I would predict that neurobiologically based biomarkers and other objective tests will emerge from current research, along with a greater appreciation of the role of neural circuits in the origins of mental disorders. I would also predict that discrete categories will give way, where appropriate, to quantifiable dimensions. At the very least, the science of mental disorders should be freed from the unintended cognitive shackles bequeathed by the DSM-III experiment.

Can Psychological Trauma Be Inherited?

2010-12-09T22:38:00.001-08:00

By Rick Nauert PhD
Senior News Editor, PsychCentral

Can Psychological Trauma Be Inherited?An emerging topic of investigation looks to determine if post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be passed to subsequent generations.

Scientists are studying groups with high rates of PTSD, such as the survivors of the Nazi death camps. Adjustment problems of the children of the survivors — the so-called “second generation” — is topic of study for researchers.

Studies suggested that some symptoms or personality traits associated with PTSD may be more common in the second generation than the general population.

It has been assumed that these transgenerational effects reflected the impact of PTSD upon the parent-child relationship rather than a trait passed biologically from parent to child.

However, Dr. Isabelle Mansuy and colleagues provide new evidence in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry that some aspects of the impact of trauma cross generations and are associated with epigenetic changes, i.e., the regulation of the pattern of gene expression, without changing the DNA sequence.

They found that early-life stress induced depressive-like behaviors and altered behavioral responses to aversive environments in mice.

Importantly, these behavioral alterations were also found in the offspring of males subjected to early stress even though the offspring were raised normally without any stress. In parallel, the profile of DNA methylation was altered in several genes in the germline (sperm) of the fathers, and in the brain and germline of their offspring.

“It is fascinating that clinical observations in humans have suggested the possibility that specific traits acquired during life and influenced by environmental factors may be transmitted across generations. It is even more challenging to think that when related to behavioral alterations, these traits could explain some psychiatric conditions in families,” said Dr. Mansuy.

“Our findings in mice provide a first step in this direction and suggest the intervention of epigenetic processes in such phenomenon.”

“The idea that traumatic stress responses may alter the regulation of genes in the germline cells in males means that these stress effects may be passed across generations. It is distressing to think that the negative consequences of exposure to horrible life events could cross generations,” commented Dr. John Krystal, editor of Biological Psychiatry.

“However, one could imagine that these types of responses might prepare the offspring to cope with hostile environments. Further, if environmental events can produce negative effects, one wonders whether the opposite pattern of DNA methylation emerges when offspring are reared in supportive environments.”

To erase a bad memory, first become a child

2010-12-09T22:24:00.000-08:00

Editorial: Troops need to remember

IT ADDS new meaning to getting in touch with your inner child. Temporarily returning the brain to a child-like state could help permanently erase a specific traumatic memory. This could help people with post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias.

At the Society of Neuroscience conference in San Diego last month researchers outlined the ways in which they have managed to extinguish basic fear memories.

Most methods rely on a behavioral therapy called extinction, in which physicians repeatedly deliver threatening cues in safe environments in the hope of removing fearful associations. While this can alleviate symptoms, in adults the original fear memory still remains. This means it can potentially be revived in the future.

A clue to permanent erasure comes from research in infant mice. With them, extinction therapy completely erases the fear memory, which cannot be retrieved. Identifying the relevant brain changes in rodents between early infancy and the juvenile stage may help researchers recreate aspects of the child-like system and induce relapse-free erasure in people.

One of the most promising techniques takes advantage of a brief period in which the adult brain resembles that of an infant, in that it is malleable. The process of jogging a memory, called "reconsolidation", seems to make it malleable for a few hours. During this time, the memory can be adapted and even potentially deleted.

Daniela Schiller at New York University and her colleagues tested this theory by presenting volunteers with a blue square at the same time as administering a small electric shock. When the volunteers were subsequently shown the blue square alone, the team measured tiny changes in sweat production, a well-documented fear response.

A day later, Schiller reminded some of the volunteers of the fear memory just once by presenting them with both square and shock, making the memory active. During this window of re-consolidation, the researchers tried to manipulate the memory by repeatedly exposing the volunteers to the blue square alone.

These volunteers produced the sweat response significantly less a day later compared with those who were given extinction therapy without any reconsolidation (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08637).

What's more, their memory loss really was permanent. Schiller later recalled a third of the volunteers from her original experiment. "A year after fear conditioning, those that had [only] extinction showed an elevated response to the square, but those with extinction during reconsolidation showed no fear response," she says.
A year after conditioning, those whose memory had been manipulated showed no fear response

The loss in infant mice of the ability to erase a fearful memory coincides with the appearance in the brain of the perineuronal net (PNN). This is a highly organised glycoprotein structure that surrounds small, connecting neurons in areas of the brain such as the amygdala, the area responsible for processing fear.

This points to a possible role for the PNN in protecting fear memories from erasure in the adult brain. Cyril Herry at the Magendie Neurocentre in Bordeaux, France, and colleagues reasoned that by destroying the PNN you might be able to return the system to an infant-like state. They gave both infant and juvenile rats fear conditioning followed by extinction therapy, then tested whether the fear could be retrieved at a later date. Like infant rats, juvenile rats with a destroyed PNN were not able to retrieve the memory.

Since the PNN can grow back, Herry suggests that in theory you could temporarily degrade the PNN in humans to permanently erase a specific traumatic memory without causing any long-term damage to memory.

"You would have to identify a potential source of trauma, like in the case of soldiers going to war," he says. "These results suggest that if you inject an enzyme to degrade the PNN before a traumatic event you would facilitate the erasure of the memory of that event afterwards using extinction therapy."

For those who already suffer from fear memories, Roger Clem at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland suggests focusing instead on the removal of calcium-permeable AMPA receptors from neurons in the amygdala - a key component of infant memory erasure. Encouraging their removal in adults may increase our ability to erase memories, he says.

"There is a group who do not respond [to traditional trauma therapy]," says Piers Bishop at the charity PTSD Resolution. "A drug approach to memory modification could be considered the humane thing to do sometimes."

Can Meditation Change Your Brain?

2010-10-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

Contemplative neuroscientists believe it can

Posted on October 27, 2010
From CNN’s Dan Gilgoff

Can people strengthen the brain circuits associated with happiness and positive behavior, just as we’re able to strengthen muscles with exercise?

Richard Davidson, who for decades has practiced Buddhist-style meditation – a form of mental exercise, he says – insists that we can.

And Davidson, who has been meditating since visiting India as a Harvard grad student in the 1970s, has credibility on the subject beyond his own experience.

A trained psychologist based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he has become the leader of a relatively new field called contemplative neuroscience – the brain science of meditation.

Over the last decade, Davidson and his colleagues have produced scientific evidence for the theory that meditation – the ancient eastern practice of sitting, usually accompanied by focusing on certain objects - permanently changes the brain for the better.

“We all know that if you engage in certain kinds of exercise on a regular basis you can strengthen certain muscle groups in predictable ways,” Davidson says in his office at the University of Wisconsin, where his research team has hosted scores of Buddhist monks and other meditators for brain scans.

“Strengthening neural systems is not fundamentally different,” he says. “It’s basically replacing certain habits of mind with other habits.”

Contemplative neuroscientists say that making a habit of meditation can strengthen brain circuits responsible for maintaining concentration and generating empathy.

One recent study by Davidson’s team found that novice meditators stimulated their limbic systems – the brain’s emotional network – during the practice of compassion meditation, an ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice.

That’s no great surprise, given that compassion meditation aims to produce a specific emotional state of intense empathy, sometimes call “loving-kindness.”

But the study also found that expert meditators – monks with more than 10,000 hours of practice – showed significantly greater activation of their limbic systems. The monks appeared to have permanently changed their brains to be more empathetic.

An earlier study by some of the same researchers found that committed meditators experienced sustained changes in baseline brain function, meaning that they had changed the way their brains operated even outside of meditation.

These changes included ramped-up activation of a brain region thought to be responsible for generating positive emotions, called the left-sided anterior region. The researchers found this change in novice meditators who’d enrolled in a course in mindfulness meditation – a technique that borrows heavily from Buddhism – that lasted just eight weeks.

But most brain research around meditation is still preliminary, waiting to be corroborated by other scientists. Meditation’s psychological benefits and its use in treatments for conditions as diverse as depression and chronic pain are more widely acknowledged.

Serious brain science around meditation has emerged only in about the last decade, since the birth of functional MRI allowed scientists to begin watching the brain and monitoring its changes in relatively real time.

Beginning in the late 1990s, a University of Pennsylvania-based researcher named Andrew Newberg said that his brain scans of experienced meditators showed the prefrontal cortex – the area of the brain that houses attention – surging into overdrive during meditation while the brain region governing our orientation in time and space, called the superior parietal lobe, went dark. (One of his scans is pictured, above.)

Newberg said his findings explained why meditators are able to cultivate intense concentration while also describing feelings of transcendence during meditation.

But some scientists said Newberg was over-interpreting his brain scans. Others said he failed to specify the kind of meditation he was studying, making his studies impossible to reproduce. His popular books, like Why God Won’t Go Away, caused more eye-rolling among neuroscientists, who said he hyped his findings to goose sales.

“It caused mainstream scientists to say that the only work that has been done in the field is of terrible quality,” says Alasdair Coles, a lecturer in neurology at England’s University of Cambridge.

Newberg, now at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, stands by his research.

And contemplative neuroscience had gained more credibility in the scientific community since his early scans.

One sign of that is increased funding from the National Institutes of Health, which has helped establish new contemplative science research centers at Stanford University, Emory University, and the University of Wisconsin, where the world’s first brain imaging lab with a meditation room next door is now under construction.

The NIH could not provide numbers on how much it gives specifically to meditation brain research but its grants in complementary and alternative medicine – which encompass many meditation studies – have risen from around $300 million in 2007 to an estimated $541 million in 2011.

“The original investigations by people like Davidson in the 1990s were seen as intriguing, but it took some time to be convinced that brain processes were really changing during meditation,” says Josephine Briggs, Director of the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Most studies so far have examined so-called focused-attention meditation, in which the practitioner concentrates on a particular subject, such as the breath. The meditator monitors the quality of attention and, when it drifts, returns attention to the object.

Over time, practitioners are supposed to find it easier to sustain attention during and outside of meditation.

In a 2007 study, Davidson compared the attentional abilities of novice meditators to experts in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Participants in both groups were asked to practice focused-attention meditation on a fixed dot on a screen while researchers ran fMRI scans of their brains.

To challenge the participants’ attentional abilities, the scientists interrupted the meditations with distracting sounds.

The brain scans found that both experienced and novice meditators activated a network of attention-related regions of the brain during meditation. But the experienced meditators showed more activation in some of those regions.

The inexperienced meditators, meanwhile, showed increased activation in brain regions that have been shown to negatively correlate with sustaining attention. Experienced meditators were better able to activate their attentional networks to maintain concentration on the dot. They had, the study suggested, changed their brains.

The fMRI scans also showed that experienced meditators had less neural response to the distracting noises that interrupted the meditation.

In fact, the more hours of experience a meditator had, the scans found, the less active his or her emotional networks were during the distracting sounds, which meant the easier it was to focus.

More recently, contemplative neuroscience has turned toward compassion meditation, which involves generating empathy through objectless awareness; practitioners call it non-referential compassion meditation.

New neuroscientific interest in the practice comes largely at the urging of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of Tibetan Buddhists, for whom compassion meditation is a time-worn tradition.

The Dalai Lama has arranged for Tibetan monks to travel to American universities for brain scans and has spoken at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, the world’s largest gathering of brain scientists.

A religious leader, the Dalai Lama has said he supports contemplative neuroscience even though scientists are stripping meditation of its Buddhist roots, treating it purely as a mental exercise that more or less anyone can do.

“This is not a project about religion,” says Davidson. “Meditation is mental activity that could be understood in secular terms.”

Still, the nascent field faces challenges. Scientists have scanned just a few hundred brains on meditation do date, which makes for a pretty small research sample. And some scientists say researchers are over eager to use brain science to prove the that meditation “works.”

“This is a field that has been populated by true believers,” says Emory University scientist Charles Raison, who has studied meditation’s effect on the immune system. “Many of the people doing this research are trying to prove scientifically what they already know from experience, which is a major flaw.”

But Davidson says that other types of scientists also have deep personal interest in what they’re studying. And he argues that that’s a good thing.

“There’s a cadre of grad students and post docs who’ve found personal value in meditation and have been inspired to study it scientifically,” Davidson says. “These are people at the very best universities and they want to do this for a career.

“In ten years,” he says, “we’ll find that meditation research has become mainstream.”

Morality: My brain made me do it

2010-10-25T03:08:00.000-07:00

Understanding how morality is linked to brain function will require us to rethink our justice system, says Martha J. Farah

By Martha J. Farah, 22 October 2010

AS SCIENCE exposes the gears and sprockets of moral cognition, how will it affect our laws and ethical norms?

We have long known that moral character is related to brain function. One remarkable demonstration of this was provided by Phineas Gage, a 19th-century construction foreman injured in an explosion. After a large iron rod was blown through his head, destroying bits of his prefrontal cortex, Gage was transformed from a conscientious, dependable worker to a selfish and erratic character, described by some as antisocial.

Recent research has shown that psychopaths, who behave antisocially and without remorse, differ from the rest of us in several brain regions associated with self-control and moral cognition (Behavioral Sciences and the Law, vol 26, p 7). Even psychologically normal people who merely score higher in psychopathic traits show distinctive differences in their patterns of brain activation when contemplating moral decisions (Molecular Psychiatry, vol 14, p 5).

The idea that moral behaviour is dependent on brain function presents a challenge to our usual ways of thinking about moral responsibility. A remorseless murderer is unlikely to win much sympathy, but show us that his cold-blooded cruelty is a neuropsychological impairment and we are apt to hold him less responsible for his actions. Presumably for this reason, fMRI evidence was introduced by the defence in a recent murder trial to show that the perpetrator had differences in various brain regions which they argued reduced his culpability. Indeed, neuroscientific evidence has been found to exert a powerful influence over decisions by judges and juries to find defendants "not guilty by reason of insanity" (Behavioral Sciences and the Law, vol 26, p 85).

Outside the courtroom, people tend to judge the behaviour of others less harshly when it is explained in light of physiological, rather than psychological processes (Ethics and Behavior, vol 15, p 139). This is as true for serious moral transgressions, like killing, as for behaviours that are merely socially undesirable, like overeating. The decreased moral stigma surrounding drug addiction is undoubtedly due in part to our emerging view of addiction as a brain disease.

What about our own actions? Might an awareness of the neural causes of behaviour influence our own behaviour? Perhaps so. In a 2008 study, researchers asked subjects to read a passage on the incompatibility of free will and neuroscience from Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis (Simon and Schuster, 1995). This included the statement, " 'You', your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." The researchers found that these people were then more likely to cheat on a computerised test than those who had read an unrelated passage (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 49).

So will the field of moral neuroscience change our laws, ethics and mores? The growing use of brain scans in courtrooms, societal precedents like the destigmatisation of addiction, and studies like those described above seem to say the answer is yes. And this makes sense. For laws and mores to persist, they must accord with our understanding of behaviour. For example, we know that young children have limited moral understanding and self-control, so we do not hold them criminally accountable for their behaviour. To the extent that neuroscience changes our understanding of human behaviour - and misbehaviour - it seems destined to alter society's standards of morality.

Martha J. Farah is the director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her new book is Neuroethics (MIT Press, 2010)

"Wet Computer" Literally Simulates Brain Cells

2010-10-21T23:40:00.000-07:00

Many next-gen supercomputers try to imitate how brain cells communicate and build digital versions of neural networks. Now the BBC brings word of the most ambitious project yet -- a "wet computer" that will literally simulate neurons and signal processing on the chemical level.

By Jeremy Hs, Popular Science

The $2.6 million effort aims to do what existing computers can't, including control tiny molecular robots or direct chemical assembly of nanogears. It may also aid the rise of intelligent drugs that react smartly to chemical signals from the human body.

The biologically-inspired computer does not harness living cells. Instead, it will use chemical versions that still spontaneously form coatings similar to biological cell walls, and can even pass signals between the chemical cells.

Such chemical cells can also undergo a "refractory period" after receiving a chemical signal. No outside signals can influence the cells during that period, and so the self-regulating system prevents an unchecked chain reaction from triggering many connected cells. That level of organization means that such chemical cells could form networks that function like a brain.

Extinguishing Fear

2010-10-20T19:21:00.001-07:00

Erasing frightening memories may be possible during a brief period after recollection.

By Molly Webster Thursday,
April 22, 2010

When we learn something, for it to become a memory, the event must be imprinted on our brain, a phenomenon known as consolidation. In turn, every time we retrieve a memory, it can be reconsolidated—that is, more information can be added to it. Now psychologist Liz Phelps of New York University and her team report using this “reconsolidation window” as a drug-free way to erase fearful memories in humans. Although techniques for overcoming fearful memories have existed for some time, these methods do not erase the initial, fearful memory. Rather they leave participants with two memories—one scary, one not—either of which may be called up when a trigger presents itself. But Phelps’s new experiment, which confirms earlier studies in rats, suggests that when a memory is changed during the so-called reconsolidation window, the original one is erased.

Using a mild electric shock, Phelps’s team taught 65 participants to fear certain colored squares as they appeared on a screen. Normally, to overcome this type of fear, researchers would show participants the feared squares again without being given a shock, in an effort to create a safe memory of the squares. Phelps’s group did that, but in some cases investigators asked subjects to contemplate their fearful memory for at least 10 minutes before they saw the squares again. These participants actually replaced their old fearful memory with a new, safe memory. When they saw the squares again paired with shocks up to a year later, they were slow to relearn their fear of the squares. In contrast, subjects who created a safe memory of the squares without first contemplating their fearful memory for 10 minutes immediately reactivated their older, fearful memory when they saw a square and got a shock.

The researchers suspect that after calling up a memory, it takes about 10 minutes before the window of opportunity opens up for the memory to be reconsolidated, or changed, in a meaningful way, Phelps explains. “But there is some combination of spacing and timing that we need to figure out,” she adds—the scientists do not yet know how long the window lasts. Even more intriguing is the role contemplation plays—does sitting and thinking about the fearful memory make it more malleable than does simply recalling it? Although questions remain, Phelps and her colleagues hope their work will eventually help people with debilitating phobias or perhaps even post-traumatic stress disorder.

Why "Magical Thinking" Works for Some People

2010-10-20T13:56:00.001-07:00

There is actually some science behind "magical thinking" and the edge that it can give people.

By Piercarlo Valdesolo
Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Ray Allen’s pregame routine never changes. A nap from 11:30am to 1:00pm, chicken and white rice for lunch at 2:30, a stretch in the gym at 3:45, a quick head shave, then practice shots at 4:30. The same amount of shots must be made from the same spots every day – the baselines and elbows of the court, ending with the top of the key. Similar examples of peculiar rituals and regimented routines in athletics abound. Jason Giambi would wear a golden thong if he found himself in a slump at the plate, and Moises Alou, concerned about losing his dexterous touch with the bat, would frequently urinate on his hands. This type of superstitious behavior can veer from the eccentric to the pathological, and though many coaches, teammates and fans snicker and shake their heads, a new study headed by Lysann Damisch at the University of Cologne and recently published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that we should all stop smirking and start rubbing our rabbit’s foot.

When it comes to superstitions, social scientists have generally agreed on one thing: they are fundamentally irrational. “Magical thinking” (as it has been called) is defined as the belief that an object, action or circumstance not logically related to a course of events can influence its outcome. In other words, stepping on a crack cannot, given what we know about the principles of causal relations, have any direct effect on the probability of your mother breaking her back. Those who live in fear of such a tragedy are engaging in magical thought and behaving irrationally.

Yet in their study, Damisch and colleagues challenge the conclusion that superstitious thoughts bear no causal influence on future outcomes. Of course, they were not hypothesizing that the trillions of tiny cracks upon which we tread every day are imbued with some sort of sinister spine-crushing malevolence. Instead, they were interested in the types of superstitions that people think bring them good luck. The lucky hats, the favorite socks, the ritualized warmup routines, the childhood blankies. Can belief in such charms actually have an influence over one’s ability to, say, perform better on a test or in an athletic competition? In other words, is Ray Allen’s performance on the basketball court in some ways dependent on eating chicken and rice at exactly 2:30? Did Jason Giambi’s golden thong actually have a hand in stopping a hitless streak?

To initially test this possibility experimenters brought participants into the lab and told them that they would be doing a little golfing. They were to see how many of 10 putts they could make from the same location. The manipulation was simply this: when experimenters handed the golf ball to the participant they either mentioned that the ball “has turned out to be a lucky ball” in previous trials, or that the ball was simply the one “everyone had used so far”. Remarkably, the mere suggestion that the ball was lucky significantly influenced performance, causing participants to make almost two more putts on average.

Why? Surely it couldn’t be that the same golf ball becomes lucky at the experimenter’s suggestion – there must be an explanation grounded in the psychological influence that belief in lucky charms has on the superstitious. In a follow-up experiment the researchers hypothesized that this kind of magical thinking can actually increase participants’ confidence in their own capabilities. That is, believing in lucky charms would increase participants’ “self-efficacy,” and it is this feeling of “I can do this,” not any magical properties of the object itself, that predict success. To test this, they had participants bring in their own lucky charms from home and assigned them to either a condition where they would be performing a task in the presence of their charm, or a condition where the experimenter removes the charm from the room before the task. Participants rated their perceived level of self-efficacy and then completed a memory task that was essentially a variant of the game Concentration.

And, indeed, the participants who were in the presence of their charm performed better on the memory task and reported increased self-efficacy. A final study sought to determine exactly how the increased confidence that comes along with a lucky charm influences performance. Specifically, was it making participants set loftier goals for themselves? Was it increasing their persistence on the task? Turns out, it’s both. Participants in the charm-present conditions reported setting higher goals on an anagram task and demonstrated increased perseverance on the task (as measured by the amount of time they spent trying to solve it before asking for help).

So what does this all mean? Should you start scouring the earth for four-leaf clovers? Establish a quirky early morning pre-work routine to increase your productivity? Sadly, if you believe the results reported in this article, none of that will do you any good. The influence of the charm depends crucially on your belief in its inherent powers. Once you acknowledge that performance is a function of what goes on in your brain rather than a product of any mystical properties of the object itself, it becomes useless. That feeling of “I can do this” will wither away as soon as you realize that nothing external, nothing mystical, will influence how you perform – it’s just you and your abilities. Like the science of astronomy strips the starry night of its magic, the science of the mind strips your superstitions of their power. You’d be better off following the model of Walt Whitman: throw on your lucky fedora and forget you ever read this article.

Moonlighting as an Alchemist (Conjurer of Chemicals)

2010-10-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

By NATALIE ANGIER

Sir Isaac Newton was a towering genius in the history of science, he knew he was a genius, and he didn’t like wasting his time. Born on Dec. 25, 1642, the great English physicist and mathematician rarely socialized or traveled far from home. He didn’t play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. He dismissed poetry as “a kind of ingenious nonsense,” and the one time he attended an opera he fled at the third act. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. “I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime,” said his assistant, Humphrey Newton, “thinking all hours lost that were not spent on his studies.”

No, it wasn’t easy being Newton. Not only did he hammer out the universal laws of motion and gravitational attraction, formulating equations that are still used today to plot the trajectories of space rovers bound for Mars; and not only did he discover the spectral properties of light and invent calculus. Sir Isaac had a whole other full-time career, a parallel intellectual passion that he kept largely hidden from view but that rivaled and sometimes surpassed in intensity his devotion to celestial mechanics. Newton was a serious alchemist, who spent night upon dawn for three decades of his life slaving over a stygian furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another.

Newton’s interest in alchemy has long been known in broad outline, but the scope and details of that moonlighting enterprise are only now becoming clear, as science historians gradually analyze and publish Newton’s extensive writings on alchemy — a million-plus words from the Newtonian archives that had previously been largely ignored.

Speaking last week at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, William Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University in Bloomington, described his studies of Newton’s alchemical oeuvre, and offered insight into the central mystery that often baffles contemporary Newton fans. How could the man who vies in surveys with Albert Einstein for the title of “greatest physicist ever,” the man whom James Gleick has aptly designated “chief architect of the modern world,” have been so swept up in what looks to modern eyes like a medieval delusion? How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold? Was Newton mad — perhaps made mad by exposure to mercury, as some have proposed? Was he greedy, or gullible, or stubbornly blind to the truth?

In Dr. Newman’s view, none of the above. Sir Isaac the Alchemist, he said, was no less the fierce and uncompromising scientist than was Sir Isaac, author of the magisterial Principia Mathematica. There were plenty of theoretical and empirical reasons at the time to take the principles of alchemy seriously, to believe that compounds could be broken down into their basic constituents and those constituents then reconfigured into other, more desirable substances.

Miners were pulling up from the ground twisted bundles of copper and silver that were shaped like the stalks of a plant, suggesting that veins of metals and minerals were proliferating underground with almost florid zeal.

Pools found around other mines seemed to have extraordinary properties. Dip an iron bar into the cerulean waters of the vitriol springs of modern-day Slovakia, for example, and the artifact will emerge agleam with copper, as though the dull, dark particles of the original had been elementally reinvented. “It was perfectly reasonable for Isaac Newton to believe in alchemy,” said Dr. Newman. “Most of the experimental scientists of the 17th century did.”

Moreover, while the alchemists of the day may not have mastered the art of transmuting one element into another — an ordeal that we have since learned requires serious equipment like a particle accelerator, or the belly of a star — their work yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. “Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,” said Dr. Newman, “and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.”

For Newton, alchemy may also have proved bigger than chemistry. Dr. Newman argues that Sir Isaac’s alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays, and that a sunbeam prismatically fractured into the familiar rainbow suite called Roy G. Biv can with a lens be resolved to tidy white sunbeam once again. “I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton’s breakthroughs in optics,” said Dr. Newman. “He’s not just passing light through a prism — he’s resynthesizing it.” Consider this a case of “technology transfer,” said Dr. Newman, “from chemistry to physics.”

The conceptual underpinning to the era’s alchemical fixation was the idea of matter as hierarchical and particulate — that tiny, indivisible and semipermanent particles come together to form ever more complex and increasingly porous substances, a notion not so different from the reality revealed by 20th-century molecular biology and quantum physics.

With the right solvents and the perfect reactions, the researchers thought, it should be possible to reduce a substance to its core constituents — its corpuscles, as Newton called them — and then prompt the corpuscles to adopt new configurations and programs. Newton and his peers believed it was possible to prompt metals to grow, or “vegetate,” in a flask. After all, many chemical reactions were known to leave lovely dendritic residues in their wake. Dissolve a pinch of silver and mercury in a solution of nitric acid, drop in a lump of metal amalgam, and soon a spidery, glittering “Tree of Diana” will form on the glass. Or add iron to hydrochloric acid and boil the solution to dryness. Then prepare a powdery silicate mix of sand and potassium carbonate. Put the two together, and you will have a silica garden, in which the ruddy ferric chloride rises and bifurcates, rises and bifurcates, as though it were reaching toward sunlight and bursting into bloom.

Add to this the miners’ finds of tree- and rootlike veins of metals and alchemists understandably concluded that metals must be not only growing underground, but ripening. Hadn’t twined ores of silver and lead been found? Might not the lead be halfway to a mature state of silverdom? Surely there was a way to keep the disinterred metal root balls sprouting in the lab, coaxing their fruit to full succulent ripeness as the noblest of metals — lead into silver, copper to gold?

Well, no. If mineral veins sometimes resemble botanical illustrations, blame it on Earth’s molten nature and fluid mechanics: when seen from above, a branching river also looks like a tree.

Yet the alchemists had their triumphs, inventing brilliant new pigments, perfecting the old — red lead oxide, yellow arsenic sulfide, a little copper and vinegar and you’ve got bright green verdigris. Artists were advised, forget about mixing your own colors: you can get the best from an alchemist. The chemistry lab replaced the monastery garden as a source of new medicines. “If you go to the U.K. today and use the word ‘chemist,’ the assumption is that you’re talking about the pharmacist,” said Dr. Newman. “That tradition goes back to the 17th century.”

Alchemists also became expert at spotting cases of fraud. It was a renowned alchemist who proved that the “miraculous” properties of vitriol springs had nothing to do with true transmutation. Instead, the water’s vitriol, or copper sulfate, would cause iron atoms on the surface of a submerged iron rod to leach into the water, leaving pores that were quickly occupied by copper atoms from the spring.

“There were a lot of charlatans, especially in the noble courts of Europe,” said Dr. Newman. Should an alchemist be found guilty of attempting to deceive the king, the penalty was execution, and in high gilded style. The alchemist would be dressed in a tinsel suit and hanged from a gallows covered in gold-colored foil.

Newton proved himself equally intolerant of chicanery, when, in his waning years, he took a position as Master of the Mint. “In pursuing clippers and counterfeiters, he called on long-nurtured reserves of Puritan anger and righteousness,” writes James Gleick in his biography of Newton.

“He was brutal,” said Mark Ratner, a materials chemist at Northwestern University. “He sentenced people to death for trying to scrape the gold off of coins.” Newton may have been a Merlin, a Zeus, the finest scientist of all time. But make no mistake about it, said Dr. Ratner. “He was not a nice guy.”

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

2010-09-06T19:18:00.001-07:00

New York Times
By: BENEDICT CAREY

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

The advantages of this approach to studying can be striking, in some topic areas. In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied.

A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.

“When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,” said Dr. Rohrer. “That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.” With mixed practice, he added, “each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.”

These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

“With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

That’s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle alters that property: “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.

But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

“Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”

Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people’s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,” is evident in daily life. The name of the actor who played Linc in “The Mod Squad”? Francie’s brother in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”? The name of the co-discoverer, with Newton, of calculus?

The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.

None of which is to suggest that these techniques — alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above — will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.

“In lab experiments, you’re able to control for all factors except the one you’re studying,” said Dr. Willingham. “Not true in the classroom, in real life. All of these things are interacting at the same time.”

But at the very least, the cognitive techniques give parents and students, young and old, something many did not have before: a study plan based on evidence, not schoolyard folk wisdom, or empty theorizing.

An idle brain may be the self's workshop

2010-08-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

Recent research suggests that mind-wandering may be important and that knowledge of how it works might help treat such conditions as Alzheimer's disease, autism, depression and schizophrenia.

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times

August 30, 2010

The resting brain is anything but idle — that simple proposition would be clear if you could peer into Mike Mrazek's noggin as he putters around his kitchen preparing his daily morning feast of scrambled eggs, oatmeal and fresh fruit.

As he plods through his quotidian ritual of gathering ingredients, cutting, chopping, bringing the pan to the correct temperature and boiling water for tea, Mrazek's thoughts, too, are something of a scrambled feast, as he later recounts.

Childhood memories jostle against thoughts of his girlfriend's progress on a cross-country journey.

Reflections on the tomatoes in his garden give way to a rehearsal of a meeting he's having later on at the university.

A flashback to his sister teasing him about his breakfast routine turns into an observation he could make while leading a meditation session in the evening.

Until recently, scientists would have found little of interest in the purposeless, mind-wandering spaces between Mrazek's conscious breakfast-making tasks — they were just the brain idling between meaningful activity.

But in the span of a few short years, they have instead come to view mental leisure as important, purposeful work — work that relies on a powerful and far-flung network of brain cells firing in unison.

Neuroscientists call it the "default mode network."

Individually, the brain regions that make up that network have long been recognized as active when people recall their pasts, project themselves into future scenarios, impute motives and feelings to other people, and weigh their personal values.

But when these structures hum in unison — and scientists have found that when we daydream, they do just that — they function as our brain's "neutral" setting. Understanding that setting may do more than lend respectability to the universal practice of zoning out: It may one day help diagnose and treat psychiatric conditions as diverse as Alzheimer's disease, autism, depression and schizophrenia — all of which disrupt operations in the default mode network.

Beyond that lies an even loftier promise. As neuroscientists study the idle brain, some believe they are exploring a central mystery in human psychology: where and how our concept of "self" is created, maintained, altered and renewed.

After all, though our minds may wander when in this mode, they rarely wander far from ourselves, as Mrazek's mealtime introspection makes plain.

That's in sharp contrast to the pattern struck by the brain when hard at work: In this mode, introspection is suppressed while we attend to pressing business — we "lose ourselves" in work. As we do so, scientists see the default mode network go quiet and other networks come alive.

Neuroscientists have long resisted discussions of "self" as either hopelessly woolly-headed or just too difficult to tackle, says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara who studies the wandering mind (with the assistance of Mrazek, a graduate student he advises).

But now, he says, research on the default mode network and mind-wandering has helped focus neuroscientists' attention to our rich inner world and raises the prospect that our sense of self, our existence as a separate being, can be observed, measured and discussed with rigor.

The idea that there may be a physical structure in the brain in which we unconsciously define who we are "would warm Freud's heart," says Dr. Marcus E. Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has pioneered work in this fledgling field. Sigmund Freud, the Austrian father of modern psychiatry, spoke exhaustively of the power of the unconscious mind in shaping our behavior and often surmised that the workings of that force would someday be revealed by scientists.

"People talk about the self and ask how it achieves some realization in the brain," Raichle says. The default mode network, he adds, "seems to be a critical element of that organization. It captures many of the features of how we think of ourselves as the self."

Changing thinking

In the last two decades, neuroscientists have identified many regions of the brain that are activated during purposeful tasks — when we count, navigate our environment, process input from our senses or perform complex motor skills.

But until very recently, the ebb and flow of thoughts — the stream of consciousness that makes Mrazek human and whose content is unique to him among humans — was the dead zone. Like geneticists who for years dismissed genetic material with no known function as "junk DNA," neuroscientists spent years dismissing the "idle" brain as just that: idle, its content just so much meaningless filler.

But in 2001, Raichle and his team began publishing neuroimaging studies that suggest different.

During tasks requiring focused attention, regions specialized to the tasks at hand became active in the subjects whose brains were being scanned. But as those men and women mentally relaxed between tasks inside the scanners, Raichle saw that the specialized regions went quiet — and a large and different cluster of brain structures consistently lighted up.

Raichle was particularly interested in a portion of the brain called the medial parietal cortex as a sort of central hub of this activity. He knew the area tended to become active when a person recalled his past.

And his work uncovered another key node in this curious circuit: the medial prefrontal cortex, a uniquely human structure that comes alive when we try to imagine what others are thinking.

Each region, Raichle realized, had a feature in common — it was focused on the self, and on the personal history and relationships by which we define ourselves as individuals.

As studies continued, scientists noticed some interesting facts.

They saw that the brain parts constituting the default mode network are uniquely vulnerable to the tangles, plaques and metabolic disturbances of Alzheimer's disease — an illness that starts by stealing one's memory and eventually robs its victims of their sense of self.

This, Raichle and colleagues would argue, suggests how important the default mode network is in making us who we are.

They saw that when operating, this network guzzles fuel at least as voraciously as do the networks that are at work when we engage in hard mental labor. That, along with other evidence, suggests to Raichle that when the default mode network is engaged, there's more than a mental vacation taking place.

So what is it doing?

Working vacation

Raichle suspects that during these moments of errant thought, the brain is forming a set of mental rules about our world, particularly our social world, that help us navigate human interactions and quickly make sense of and react to information — about a stranger's intentions, a child's next move, a choice before us — without having to run a complex and conscious calculation of all our values, expectations and beliefs.

Raichle says such mental shortcuts are necessary because the brain cannot possibly take in all the detail available to our senses at any given moment. The default mode network, he proposes, keeps a template handy that lets us assume a lot about ourselves and the people and environment we interact with.

Raichle points to another odd distinction of the default mode network — one that suggests it plays a central role in our functioning. Its central hub has two separate sources of blood supply, making it far less vulnerable than most other regions of the brain to damage from a stroke.

"That's an insurance policy: This area is critically important," he says.

Neuroscientists suspect that the default mode network may speak volumes about our mental health, based on studies in the last three years that suggest it is working slightly differently in people with depression, autism and other disorders. (See related story.)

That fact underscores a point: Just as sleep appears to play an important role in learning, memory consolidation and maintaining the body's metabolic function, some scientists wonder whether unstructured mental time — time to zone out and daydream — might also play a key role in our mental well-being. If so, that's a cautionary tale for a society that prizes productivity and takes a dim view of mind-wandering.

Such social pressure, Schooler says, overlooks the lessons from studies on the resting brain — that zoning out and daydreaming, indulged in at appropriate times, might serve a larger purpose in keeping us healthy and happy.

"People have this fear of being inadequately engaged, and as a consequence they overlook how engaging their own minds can be," Schooler says. "Each one of us can be pretty good company to ourselves if we allow our minds to go there."

You were anesthetized during surgery: Does that mean you forgot everything that happened?

2010-08-28T01:16:00.000-07:00

By Alan Fogel

Aug 10 2010

In my book on body sense, I wrote about a middle-aged client I called Rebecca who, during a Rosen Method Bodywork session, "remembered" something that happened to her during an abdominal surgery under general anesthesia, a surgery that occurred a dozen years earlier. She remembered the body sense of having some kind of wedge put into her to hold her open during the procedure. She had no conscious memory of anything that occurred during the surgery to remove nonmalignant uterine fibroids. Since the surgery, for the entire 12-years period, she had continued to experience abdominal pain that should have, but did not, disappear in the months following the surgery.

Medicine is filled with cases of so-called non-diagnosable pain including chest pains with no evidence of heart problems, back pain without tissue damage, and in Rebecca's case, abdominal pain with no evidence of abnormalities consequent to the surgery or due to any other known medical condition.

These cases are indeed mysterious. First, why would pain continue for so long without apparent cause? And even more disconcerting is the possibility that the body could "remember" what the surgery may have felt like even though there was no ordinary, waking state of consciousness. Could these two mysteries be related? Could the fact that the body remembers even when the conscious mind does not account for the otherwise inexplicable persistence of pain? If so, it presents yet another unsolved puzzle: Why doesn't this happen to everyone who has surgery? Let's take a closer look at Rebecca's case.

I had been giving her Rosen Method treatments for over 3 months as her body sense deepened and she was better able to tolerate feeling the painful sensations in her belly as well as noticing more about her other sensations and feelings.

About mid-way through the session I reported in the book (Chapter 7), Rebecca said, "I feel like there's a division between the right and left side of my belly down there" (where my hand was gently touching her lower abdomen).

In a request to deepen her body sense, I asked, "Does one side of your belly feel different than the other side."

"I don't know," was the reply.

After a few minutes, she said, "You know that vertical split in my belly . . . (a long pause followed) . . . that's where they made the incision."

Her voice was a bit shaky with this so I could tell there was some emotion behind it. As I waited to see if there was a response in her body, I wondered about this statement. Surely, I thought, she knew the location of the scar. Then I began to feel her internal organs beginning to soften and her breathing slowing down, becoming less fretful. I said, "Your body remembers the surgery even if you were anesthetized, even if you thought you were asleep." As I talked, I was actually thinking of her complex history including the invasion of her reproductive anatomy and emotions by an alcoholic and abusive ex-husband and father of her only daughter, whose childbirth was no-doubt complicated by the marital troubles. I imagined that this new body sense of the surgery felt like yet another assault - another invasion of her uterus and vulnerably soft belly -- that was working through her in deep and unknown ways.

After a while she said, "I bet they put a wedge into me, to hold me open." Noting the relaxation response and the confidence in her voice when she said this, I replied, "Yes, that's probably what happened." As the session came to an end, Rebecca reported that she felt warmth and energy flowing through her whole body and a complete absence of the pain in her abdomen that had been there since the surgery.

This return of warmth and feeling in a previously tight part of the body is generally a consequence of bringing one's awareness fully into the present moment of felt, embodied experience. It is like the natural and effortless flow of tears and relief when one finally allows a previously suppressed emotion to surface. This is the "truth" of body sensing. More often than not, these spontaneous body releases (the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system) occur in the company of a listening and supportive loved one or therapist when one feels safe enough to allow the emotions to arise in the moment.

Why did Rebecca's abdominal pain continue for so long when other patients recover more quickly? It may be that when a physical injury or wound occurs in the same region of the body where some other trauma has previously lodged itself, the trauma from the surgical wound becomes linked to the earlier trauma in a way that amplifies the effect. The earlier trauma may predispose one to be more vulnerable to disease in that same region of the body, possibly explaining why some people may have persistent symptoms even though the tissues have completely healed.

The body sense of lasting effects of the surgery could also come from the trauma of the surgical procedure itself. Some of this can be prevented with appropriate pre- and post-operative relaxation and mindfulness meditation. One study found that women who listened to a recording of "positive therapeutic suggestions" while anesthetized for abdominal hysterectomy needed 24% less pain medication even though the patients claimed to not remember anything that was on the tape. Although people do not remember the specific suggestions, it is as if their body remembers the surgery as being less traumatic.

Rebecca did not have a visual image of the wedge, only a sensation in her belly which, when she was able to tune into it during the Rosen session, felt like having a wedge inserted. I call this participatory memory, not an armchair recollection of events but a déjà-vu style reliving of the feelings and sensations in the present moment. To have a therapeutic effect, this type of memory does not have to accurately reflect what the surgeon actually did. A clamp or other device may have been used. It doesn't really matter.

Rebecca's abdominal pain did not completely disappear following that session. As we worked together over the next few months, she discovered that her pain returned whenever she faced conflicts in her romantic encounters and in relation to her daughter's leaving for college. As a result, the link between the recurrent abdominal pain, her surgery, and her attachment difficulties and reproductive history could be felt, named and thus brought into the orbit of self-regulation and re-engagement with self and others. Eventually, she came to let go of her worries about the pain, accepting that it would come and go, realizing that it was informative of her emotional state, and that it didn't last long once she was able to just let herself feel it and its linkages to her interpersonal situations.

This is not a "cure" in the usual sense because the pain was not completely gone. Pain, as I've written in previous posts, has a large psychological component. The tissue damage from layers of prior trauma may never completely heal. What does change is the expansion of our body sense into a restoration of our sense of becoming, once again, a whole self, wounds and all. Even terminally ill people can be "healthy" in this broader sense of well-being.

I have worked with people who had undiagnosed chest pains consequent to open heart surgery or pacemaker implantation. In these cases, there was also a related attachment trauma, as if the disease and the surgical wound continued to fester in an unresolved emotional wound of a broken heart. I have seen the same patterns regardless of the sources of the compounding traumas: medical or non-medical, adult or childhood onset, automobile accidents or emotional abuse. It is not always the case that pain around the heart relates to protection against failed love, or that pelvic pain relates to sexual or reproductive trauma. Yet everyone's body has certain neuromuscular modes of expressing and protecting itself which become part of who we are, how we feel, and how we relate to ourselves and to others. Our body tissues carry a history that only the body sense, and not mental reflection, can reveal.

Self-Serve Brains

2010-08-11T19:23:00.001-07:00

Personal identity veers to the right hemisphere
Bruce Bower

The concept of identity theft assumes an entirely new meaning for people with brain injuries that rob them of their sense of self—the unspoken certainty that one exists as a person in a flesh—bounded body with a unique set of life experiences and relationships. Consider the man who, after sustaining serious brain damage, insisted that his parents, siblings, and friends had been replaced by look-alikes whom he had never met. Everyone close to him had become a familiar-looking stranger. Another brain-injured patient asserted that his physicians, nurses, and physical therapists were actually his sons, daughters-in-law, and coworkers. He identified himself as an ice skater whom he had seen on a television program.

The sense of "I" can also go partially awry. After a stroke had left one of her arms paralyzed, a woman reported that the limb was no longer part of her body. She told a physician that she thought of the arm as "my pet rock."

Other patients bequeath their physical infirmities to phantom children. For instance, a woman blinded by a brain tumor became convinced that it was her child who was sick and blind, although the woman had no children.

These strange transformations and extensions of personal identity are beginning to yield insights into how the brain contributes to a sense of self, says neuroscientist Todd E. Feinberg of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. Thanks to technology that literally gets inside people's heads, researchers now are probing how the brain contributes to a sense of self and to perceptions of one's body and its control. Scientists expect that their efforts to shed light on the vexing nature of consciousness, as well as on the roots of mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, characterized by disturbed self-perception.

I spy
Scholars have argued for more than 300 years about whether a unified sense of self exists at all. A century ago, Sigmund Freud developed his concept of ego, a mental mechanism for distinguishing one's body and thoughts from those of other people. Around the same time, psychologist William James disagreed, writing that each person's "passing states of consciousness" create a false sense that an "I" or an ego runs the mental show.

Researchers still debate whether the self is the internal engine of willful behavior or simply a useful fiction that makes a person feel responsible for his or her actions. Some investigators argue that each person harbors many selves capable of emerging in different situations and contexts.

Regardless of philosophical differences, Feinberg notes, evidence suggests that the brain's right hemisphere often orchestrates basic knowledge about one's self, just as the left hemisphere usually assumes primary responsibility for language.

Disorders of the self caused by brain damage fall into two main categories, Feinberg proposes. Some patients lose their personal connection to significant individuals or entities, such as the man who thought everyone he knew was a familiar stranger and the woman who regarded her lifeless arm as a pet rock. Other patients perceive personal connections where they don't exist, such as the man who saw his medical caretakers as family and coworkers and the woman who mentally conceived a phantom daughter.

In both categories, Feinberg says, "right brain damage is much more likely than left brain damage to cause lasting disturbances of the normal relationship between individuals and their environments."

Other neuroscientists take a similar view. According to brain-imaging studies conducted by researchers including Jean Decety and Jessica A. Sommerville, both of the University of Washington in Seattle, during the past 3 years, a right brain network located mainly in the frontal lobe organizes neural efforts aimed at discerning one's body and thoughts. That network overlaps a brain circuit that plays a role in identifying others, perhaps contributing to the two-sided nature of the self as "special and social, unique and shared," Decety and Sommerville said in a seminal 2003 article.

The right me
In order to coordinate the relationship between the self and the world, the brain takes sides, according to work by Feinberg and Julian Paul Keenan of Montclair State University in New Jersey. They analyzed patterns of brain damage in 29 previously published cases of disordered selves. Injury to the frontal region of the right hemisphere occurred in 28 people, compared with left-frontal damage in 14.

Ten of the patients had also incurred injuries to other parts of the right brain, compared with three individuals who displayed damage in other left brain areas, Feinberg and Keenan report in the December 2005 Consciousness and Cognition. Research in the past decade on the recognition of one's face reached similar conclusions. In a study directed by Keenan, adults with no known brain impairment viewed images that gradually transformed from their own faces into the face of a famous person such as Marilyn Monroe or Bill Clinton. Participants alternated using their left or right hands to hit keys that indicated whether they saw themselves or a famous person in each composite image.

When responding with their left hands, volunteers identified themselves in composite images more often than when they used their right hands. Since each side of the brain controls movement on the opposite side of the body, the left-handed results implicated the right brain in self-recognition.

Similar findings came from epileptic patients who underwent a medical procedure in which one brain hemisphere at a time was anesthetized. Keenan and his colleagues showed each patient an image that blended features of his or her own face with facial features of a famous person and later asked whose face the patient had seen. When tested with only the right brain awake, most patients reported that they had seen their own faces. When only the left brain was active, they usually recalled having seen the famous face.

A brain-scan investigation of 10 healthy adults, published in the April 15, 2005 NeuroImage, also implicates the right hemisphere in self-recognition. A team led by Lucina Uddin of the University of California, Los Angeles showed volunteers a series of images that, to varying degrees, blended their own faces with those of same-sex coworkers. Participants pressed keys indicating whether they saw themselves or a coworker in each image.

Pronounced blood flow, a sign of heightened neural activity, appeared in certain parts of the right hemisphere only when the participants recognized themselves, Uddin's group reports. Previous studies in monkeys indicated that these areas of the brain contain so-called mirror neurons, which respond similarly when an animal executes an action or observes another animal perform the same action

A right brain network of these mirror neurons maintains an internal self-image for comparison with faces that one sees, Uddin and her colleagues propose.

Still, not everyone regards the right brain as central to the self. Todd F. Heatherton of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and his coworkers reported in 2003 on a patient who had had surgery to disconnect the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the neural hemispheres. That split-brain patient recognized himself in images that blended his features with those of one of the researchers only when the images appeared in his right visual field and were thus handled by his left brain.

"Recognition of the self is one of the most basic, yet poorly understood, cognitive operations," Uddin says.

Losing control
Chris Frith, a neuroscientist at University College London, has long wondered why people diagnosed with schizophrenia often experience their own actions as being controlled by others. A person with this severe mental disorder may report, for example, that space aliens ordered him to behave destructively.

Fifteen years ago, Frith thought that schizophrenia robbed people of the ability to monitor their intentions to act. If their behavior came as a complete surprise, they might attribute it to external forces.

Frith abandoned that idea after reading neurologists' reports of a strange condition called anarchic-hand syndrome. Damage to motor areas on one side of the brain leaves these patients unable to control the actions of the hand on the opposite side of the body. For example, when one patient tried to soap a washcloth with his right hand, his left hand, much to his chagrin, kept putting the soap back in its dish. Another patient used one hand to remove the other from doorknobs, which it repeatedly grabbed as he walked by doors.

Despite being unaware of any intention to use a hand in these ways, anarchic-hand patients don't experience their behavior as controlled by space aliens or another outside entity—they just try to correct their wayward hands.

Frith now suspects that anarchic-hand syndrome and schizophrenia's delusions of being controlled by others share a neural defect that makes it seem like one's movements occur passively. However, people with schizophrenia mistakenly perceive the passive movements as having been intentional.

In support of this possibility, Frith and his colleagues find that when shown scenes of abstract shapes moving across a computer screen, patients with schizophrenia, but not mentally healthy volunteers, attribute good and bad intentions to these shapes. Patients with schizophrenia may monitor their own actions in excruciating detail for signs of external control, Frith suggests.

In general, people rarely think about their selves but act as if such entities must exist. "The normal mark of the self in action is that we have very little experience of it," Frith says.

Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner goes further. Expanding the view of William James, Wegner argues that the average person's sense of having a self that consciously controls his or her actions is an illusion. This controversial proposal builds on an experiment conducted more than 20 years ago by neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco.

Libet found that although volunteers' conscious decisions to perform a simple action preceded the action itself, they occurred just after a distinctive burst of electrical activity in the brain signaled the person's readiness to move. In other words, people decided to act only after their brains had unconsciously prepared them to do so.

Wegner has since performed experiments demonstrating the ease with which people claim personal responsibility for actions that they have not performed. In one study, participants looked in a mirror at the movements of an experimenter's arms situated where their own arms would be. When the arms moved according to another researcher's instructions, volunteers reported that they had willed the movements.

Feinberg says that these findings offer no reason to write off the self as a mental mirage.

Waist not
A young woman stands in neuroscientist J. Henrik Ehrsson's laboratory at London's University College and places her palms on her waist. Cuffs placed over her wrists begin to vibrate tendons just under the skin, creating the sensation that her hands are bending inward. At the same time, the woman feels her waist and hips shrink by several inches to accommodate the imagined hand movements. Dr. Ehrsson's illusory instant-waist-loss program lasts only about 30 seconds.

Ehrsson and his coworkers used a brain-imaging machine to measure blood flow in the brains of 24 people as they experienced this illusion. Parts of the left parietal cortex, located near the brain's midpoint, displayed especially intense activity as volunteers felt their waists contract, the scientists report in the December 2005 PloS Biology.

The greater the parietal response, the more waist shrinkage the individual reported.

The scientists suspect that the activated parietal areas integrate sensory information from different body parts, a key step in constructing an internal image of one's body size and shape. When the brain receives a message that the hands are bending into the waist, it adjusts the internal body image accordingly, Ehrsson's team hypothesizes.

The brain can adjust its internal body map in a matter of minutes, the experiment demonstrates. Researchers who similarly induced illusions of expanding fingers came to that same conclusion.

The possibility that the brain can redraw body image in dramatic ways resonates with neuroscientist Miguel A.L. Nicolelis of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., and his colleagues. They've found that after monkeys learn to alter their brain activity to control a robotic arm, the animals' brains show the same activity pattern as when they move their own limbs.

Nicolelis' team reported in 2003 that the researchers had implanted electrodes in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brains of two female rhesus monkeys that used a joystick to control a cursor on a computer screen. That action maneuvered a robotic arm in another room. The animals gradually learned to modulate their brain signals to reposition the cursor, without moving a muscle.

Electrode data show that, after training, many neurons that formerly emitted synchronized signals as the monkeys manually manipulated the joystick to control the robotic arm also did so when the animals performed the same task mentally. Those results appeared in the May 11, 2005 Journal of Neuroscience.

The monkeys assimilated into their neural self-images a tool that they had learned to use proficiently, Nicolelis suggests. Apes and people possess an even stronger capacity for integrating tools into the brain's definition of self, in his view. This process may underlie the acquisition of expertise.

. "Our brains' representations of our bodies are adaptable enough to incorporate any tools that we create to interact with the environment, from a robot appendage to a computer keyboard or a tennis racket," Nicolelis says.

Self doubts
Despite the proliferation of such studies, the self's special status in the brain is far from assured. After reviewing relevant brain imaging and psychology studies, neuroscientists Seth J. Gillihan and Martha J. Farah, both of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, found little compelling evidence for brain networks devoted solely to physical or psychological aspects of the self.

At most, work such as Feinberg's with brain-damaged patients indicates that singular brain networks distinguish between one's limbs and those of other people, the researchers say. There are also suggestions that other brain areas foster a sense of control over one's limb movements, Gillihan and Farah reported in the January 2005 Psychological Bulletin.

Still, much of what we typically think of as "the self" may not be assignable to brain states or structures, in their view.

Feinberg argues that each of the increasingly complex levels of the brain—including the brain stem, the limbic system, and the cortex—contributes to intentional actions and to perceiving meaning in the world, the main ingredients of an "inner I."

Brain-damaged patients vividly illustrate the self's resiliency, Feinberg adds. While injury to the right frontal brain transforms some patients' identities in odd ways, other comparably injured patients somehow maintain their old selves.

A person's coping style and emotional resources usually influence responses to right brain damage, according to Feinberg's clinical observations. For example, one patient, a young man living half a world away from his family, referred to his paralyzed left arm as his brother's arm.

Feinberg asked the man what it meant to him to possess his sibling's arm rather than his own. "It makes me feel good," the man responded, in a voice choked with emotion. "Having my brother's arm makes me feel closer to my family."

Philosophy and Faith

2010-08-02T02:19:00.000-07:00

By Gary Gutting

One of my jobs as a teacher of bright, mostly Catholic undergraduates is to get them thinking about why they hold their religious beliefs. It’s easy enough to spark discussion about the problem of evil (“Can you really read the newspaper everyday and continue to believe in an all-perfect God?”) or about the diversity of religious beliefs (“If you’d been born in Saudi Arabia, don’t you think you’d be a Muslim?”).

Inevitably, however, the discussion starts to fizzle when someone raises a hand and says
(sometimes ardently, sometimes smugly) “But aren’t you forgetting about faith?”

That seems to be enough for most students. The trump card has been played, and they — or at least the many who find religion more a comfort than a burden — happily remember that believing means never having to explain why.

I myself, the product of a dozen years of intellectually self-confident Jesuit education, have little sympathy with the “it’s just faith” response. “How can you say that?” I reply. “You wouldn’t buy a used car just because you had faith in what the salesperson told you. Why would you take on faith far more important claims about your eternal salvation?” And, in fact, most of my students do see their faith not as an intellectually blind leap but as grounded in evidence and argument.

The popular formulations to which theists and atheists appeal do not prove what they claim to prove.

“Well, if there’s no God,” they say, “how can you explain why anything at all exists or why the world is governed by such precise laws of nature?”

At this point, the class perks up again as I lay out versions of the famous arguments for the existence of God, and my students begin to think that they’re about to get what their parents have paid for at a great Catholic university: some rigorous intellectual support for their faith.

Soon enough, however, things again fall apart, since our best efforts to construct arguments along the traditional lines face successive difficulties. The students realize that I’m not going to be able to give them a convincing proof, and I let them in on the dirty secret: philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God’s existence or any of the other “big questions” we’ve been discussing for 2500 years.

This seems to bring us back to where we started: “It’s all faith.” I, with my Jesuit-inspired confidence in reason and evidence, have always resisted this. But I have also felt the tug of my students’ conclusion that philosophy, although a good intellectual exercise and the source of tantalizing puzzles and paradoxes, has no real significance for religious faith.

Recently, however, I’ve realized a mistake in the way that I — and most of my professional colleagues — tend to think about philosophy and faith. (One of the great benefits of getting to teach philosophy to bright undergraduates is that it makes it easier to think outside the constraints of current professional assumptions.) The standard view is that philosophers’ disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers. The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can’t agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals? An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don’t have.

This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers’ disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God’s existence (for example, my colleague Alvin Plantinga’s modal-logic formulation of St. Anselm’s ontological argument or William Rowe’s complex version of a probabilistic argument from evil). There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals. Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept — the way we do scientific claims — on the authority of expert consensus.

In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.

This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments. Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith. But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief. How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?
What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher?

An answer may lie in work by philosophers as different as David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alvin Plantinga. In various ways, they have shown that everyday life is based on “basic” beliefs for which we have no good arguments. There are, for example, no more basic truths from which we can prove that the past is often a good guide to the future, that our memories are reliable, or that other people have a conscious inner life. Such beliefs simply — and quite properly — arise from our experience in the world. Plantinga in particular has argued that core religious beliefs can have a status similar to these basic but unproven beliefs. His argument has clear plausibility for some sorts of religious beliefs. Through experiences of, for example, natural beauty, moral obligation, or loving and being loved, we may develop an abiding sense of the reality of an extraordinarily good and powerful being who cares about us. Who is to say that such experiences do not give reason for belief in God as much as parallel (though different) experiences give reason for belief in reliable knowledge of the past and future and of other human minds? There is still room for philosophical disputes about this line of thought, but it remains the most plausible starting point of a philosophical case for religious belief.

But this defense of faith faces a steep hurdle. Although it may support generic religious claims about a good and powerful being who cares for us, it is very hard to see it sustaining the specific and robust claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam about how God is concretely and continually involved in our existence. God is said to be not just good and powerful but morally perfect and omnipotent, a sure ultimate safeguard against any evil that might threaten us. He not only cares about us but has set up precise moral norms and liturgical practices that we must follow to ensure our eternal salvation. Without such specificity, religion lacks the exhilarating and terrifying possibilities that have made it such a powerful force in human history.

But how can religious experience sustain faith in a specific salvation narrative, particularly given the stark differences among the accounts of the great religious traditions? What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher? Or that the Bible rather than the Koran is the revelation of God’s own words? Believers may have strong feelings of certainty, but each religion rejects the certainty of all the others, which leaves us asking why they privilege their own faith.

I am not saying that religious believers are in principle incapable of finding satisfactory answers to such questions. I am saying that philosophy and religion can and must speak to each other, and that those who take their beliefs seriously need to reflect on these questions, and that contemporary philosophical discussions (following on Hume and Wittgenstein) about knowledge, belief, certainty and disagreement are highly relevant to such reflection — and potentially, to an individual’s belief. This is what I will try to convey to my students the next time I teach introductory philosophy of religion.

Gary Gutting teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and co-edits Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an on-line book review journal. His most recent book is “What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy.”

Monogamy unnatural for our sexy species

2010-07-30T00:59:00.000-07:00

By Christopher Ryan, Special to CNN

Editor's note: Christopher Ryan is a psychologist, teacher and the co-author, along with Cacilda Jethá, of "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality," published by Harper Collins.

(CNN) -- Seismic cultural shifts about 10,000 years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries, it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists and covered up by moralizing therapists.

In recent decades, the debate over human sexual evolution has entertained only two options: Humans evolved to be either monogamists or polygamists. This tired debate generally devolves into an antagonistic stalemate where women are said to have evolved to seek male-provisioned domesticity while every man secretly yearns for his own harem. The battle between the sexes, we're told, is bred into our blood and bones.

Couples who turn to a therapist for guidance through the inevitable minefields of marriage are likely to receive the confusing message that long-term pair bonding comes naturally to our species, but marriage is still a lot of work.

Few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to persuade a gay man or lesbian to "grow up, get real, and stop being gay." But most insist that long-term sexual monogamy is "normal," while the curiosity and novelty-seeking inherent in human sexuality are signs of pathology. Thus, couples are led to believe that waning sexual passion in enduring marriages or sexual interest in anyone but their partner portend a failed relationship, when in reality these things often signify nothing more than that we are Homo sapiens.

This is a problem because there is no reason to believe monogamy comes naturally to human beings. In fact, for millions of years, evolutionary forces have cultivated human libido to the point where ours is arguably the most sexual species on Earth.

Our ancestors evolved in small-scale, highly egalitarian foraging groups that shared almost everything. Anthropologists have demonstrated time and again that immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nearly universal in their so-called "fierce egalitarianism." Sharing is not just encouraged; it's mandatory.

Most foragers divide and distribute meat equitably, breast-feed one another's babies, have little or no privacy from one another, and depend upon each other every day for survival. Although our social world revolves around private property and individual responsibility, theirs spins toward interrelation and mutual dependence. This might sound like New Age idealism, but it's no more noble a system than any other insurance pool. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone's benefit in a foraging context. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly.

For nomadic foragers who might walk hundreds of kilometers each month, personal property -- anything needed to be carried -- is kept to a minimum. Little thought is given to who owns the land, or the fish in the river, the clouds in the sky, or the kids underfoot. An individual male's "parental investment," in other words, tends to be diffuse in societies like those in which we evolved, not directed toward one particular woman -- or harem of women -- and her children, as conventional views of our sexual evolution insist.

But when people began living in settled agricultural communities, social reality shifted deeply and irrevocably. It became crucially important to know where your property ended and your neighbor's began. Remember the 10th Commandment: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that [is] thy neighbor's." With agriculture, the human female went from occupying a central, respected role to being just another possession for men to accumulate and defend, along with his house, slaves and asses.

The standard narrative posits that paternity certainty has always been of utmost importance to our species, whether expressed as monogamy or harem-based polygyny. Students are taught that our "selfish genes" lead us to organize our sexual lives around assuring paternity, but it wasn't until the shift to agriculture that land, livestock and other forms of wealth could be kept in the family. For the first time in the history of our species, biological paternity became a concern.

Our bodies, minds and sexual habits all reflect a highly sexual primate. Research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy and psychology points to the same conclusion: A nonpossessive, gregarious sexuality was the human norm until the rise of agriculture and private property just 10,000 years ago, about 5 percent of anatomically modern humans' existence on Earth.

The two primate species closest to us lend strong -- if blush-inducing -- support to this vision. Ovulating female chimps have intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males, and bonobos famously enjoy frequent group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and conflict-free.

The human body tells the same story. Men's testicles are far larger than those of any monogamous or polygynous primate, hanging vulnerably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve standby sperm cells for multiple ejaculations. Men sport the longest, thickest primate penis, as well as an embarrassing tendency to reach orgasm when the woman is just getting warmed up. These are all strong indications of so-called sperm competition in our species' past.

Women's pendulous breasts, impossible-to-ignore cries of sexual delight, or "female copulatory vocalization" to the clipboard-carrying crowd, and capacity for multiple orgasms also validate this story of prehistoric promiscuity.

"But we're not apes!" some might insist. But we are, in fact. Homo sapiens is one of four African great apes, along with chimps, bonobos and gorillas.

"OK, but we have the power to choose how to live," comes the reply. This is true. Just as we can choose to be vegans, we can decide to lead sexually monogamous lives. But newlyweds would be wise to remember that just because you've chosen to be vegan, it's utterly natural to yearn for an occasional bacon cheeseburger.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Christopher Ryan.

Do psychologists still listen to Freud?

2010-06-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
06.07.2010

Psychoanalysts today engage in dialogue with patients to help them explore their minds Psychoanalysis as a therapy is no longer dominant, but is still practiced Cognitive behavioral therapy is more focused on changing patterns of thought and belief. (CNN) -- David Weiss sat down on his therapist's couch on Thursday troubled by moments of emptiness that made him ask himself, "Is this it?"

After talking it through with her, however, he realized that such experiences could be peaceful, and even welcome, if he viewed them with a different mind-set.

Weiss has been in psychoanalysis for three years, but his experience has many distinctions from the theories that the field's founder, Sigmund Freud, outlined in the early 1900s. No talk of the "id," "ego" and "superego." No mention of an Oedipus complex. But the ideas of connecting the past to the present and examining the unconscious mind remain at the core of a therapy that patients like Weiss have found helpful in approaching everyday life.

"You can start connecting different parts of how you think in a new way," said Weiss, 38, a blogger and music journalist in New York. "It can be extremely productive; it can also be incredibly frustrating."

Psychoanalysis as a therapy became somewhat marginalized decades ago as biological and behavioral approaches gained recognition, but plenty of mental health professionals still practice some variation of it, and Freud's ideas are crucial in a wide spectrum of therapies today. The American Psychoanalytic Association, a professional organization with more than 3,000 members, will have its 99th annual meeting this week. It will include discussions of applying Freud's ideas in a modern context.

"Pure psychoanalysis is not as popular or well-known as it was in the '50s and '60s, for example, but ironically I think it's better than it was back then," said Dr. Prudence Gourguechon, president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

More so than other kinds of talk therapy, psychoanalysis involves an exploration of the patient's past. Freud wrote that certain problems in adult life stem from "fixations" in childhood, conflicts that patients are still stuck on from their early years. Free-associations -- the patient's mind wanders to explore what things in life or in dreams make them think of -- are also important. The relationship that develops between doctor and patient is also emphasized, and may mirror the patient's relationship to a parent or some other figure from youth.

Psychoanalysis has evolved to become more of a dialogue between patient and doctor than an observation of the patient by an authoritative expert, Gourguechon said.

"We see it more as an interactive system where we can learn about how a patient experiences the world, as he experiences the analyst, and the analyst experiences him; it's more of a feedback loop," Gourguechon said.

For Weiss, who blogs about his analysis experience as Mr. Analysand through "Psychology Today," psychoanalysis mentally equipped him for major life changes. Therapy helped him see that his job at a public relations firm wasn't leading to a career he could steer himself, and that he wanted to branch out. He ended up quitting his secure job 1½ years ago to co-found sonicscoop.com, a website about the New York music scene. Today, he believes that was the right choice, and that psychoanalysis helped him stay organized throughout the process.

Psychoanalysis can be burdensome in terms of time and money, and some insurance companies will not pay for the frequent sessions, doctors say. Practitioners recommend three to five sessions per week (Weiss has been going three times a week since 2008). Costs vary depending on the doctor, and there is psychoanalysis provided at some low-cost clinics, but more frequent sessions per week may translate into more expense, Gourguechon said.

The method has drawn criticism because there is still no real empirical study to support psychoanalysis in the form of a frequent, long-term therapy. To study it in this way would be difficult, Gourguechon said. But "psychodynamic psychotherapy" -- like psychoanalysis but more limited, and usually once per week -- has demonstrated effectiveness in numerous randomized controlled studies.

More commonplace than Freudian analysis is a method called cognitive behavioral therapy, a scientifically tested method that focuses more on managing problems and less on how childhood events may have influenced them, said Alan Hilfer, director of psychology at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.

But even non-psychoanalysts use Freud's ideas. Mark Crawford, a psychologist in Roswell, Georgia, said so-called "Freudian slips" are useful in starting conversations with patients. Unintentional mistakes or substitutions in speech may reflect underlying tensions in a person's mind, experts said.

"What we speak is the outcome of conflicting needs and wishes, and so when we make a slip, we are telling people that we probably are ambivalent about what we are saying," Richards said.

Most of what drives behavior is unconscious, Freud postulated. A buried part of the psyche called the id is driven by pleasure; it has all the person's wishes and motivations. The ego is the cognitive, rational means to deal with life. The superego follows a moral principle, imposing guilt and incorporating the external authority. Neuroscientists have not found these precise structures on brain scans, but there have been functional magnetic resonance imaging studies looking at the different parts of the brain that activate for pleasure, critical thinking and guilt.

Today, Weiss genuinely feels psychoanalysis has connected parts of his brain in ways they hadn't been linked before. Still, revelations don't come easy. He entered therapy to deal with "a classic blend of issues pertaining to sex, substances and my mother," he said, and some problems he had back then remain.

He leaves some sessions feeling like he's made progress; other times, he's confused. But on the whole he believes psychoanalysis has had an enormously positive impact on his life.

"I think people still are concerned that going into therapy somehow provides some kind of stigma," he said. "It can be really gratifying; it can be really scary. But if anyone is thinking about trying it, they really should just go ahead and do it."

Drug could get into the autistic mind

2010-06-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

New Scientist Magazine
01 June 2010 by Celeste Biever

CAN people with autism take a pill to improve their social skills? For the first time, drugs are being tested that could address the social difficulties associated with autism and other learning disorders by tackling some of the brain chemistry thought to underlie them.

The only drugs currently prescribed to people with autism seek to dampen aggression and anxiety. The new drugs, now in the very early stages of clinical testing, address some of the classic symptoms of autism.

"People may learn more, learn to speak better, learn social skills and to be more communicative," says Randall Carpenter of Seaside Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is testing one of the drugs.

Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer at the charity Autism Speaks and a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is equally enthusiastic about the prospect of a new class of drugs. "For the first time we are seeing drugs that could tackle core autism symptoms," she says.

For the first time we are seeing drugs that could tackle the core symptoms of autism
The Seaside trial is aimed at a learning disorder called fragile X, which is associated with autism. People with fragile X carry a mutation in a gene involved in strengthening brain connections associated with salient experiences. Stronger brain connections allow people to distinguish these events from background noise, making this a key process in learning.

Carpenter and his colleagues are testing a drug called arbaclofen, which seems to reverse the effect of the mutation. At the International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 23 May, they presented initial results suggesting that the drug may improve the social skills of people with fragile X and autism, including improved communication and general sociability, and fewer outbursts.

Seaside's trial is not the only attempt to alter the brain chemistry of people with autism. The hormone oxytocin, also known as the cuddle chemical, helps us connect social contact with feelings of pleasure, and some people with autism produce less of it. Several teams are looking into boosting oxytocin to relieve symptoms of autism.

At the Philadelphia meeting, a team led by Evdokia Anagnostou, a child neurologist at Bloorview Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, reported that people given the hormone twice daily for six weeks were more likely to be better at recognising emotions and at social functioning, and had a better quality of life than others given a placebo.

Trying to alter the brain chemistry thought to underlie autistic behaviour has never been done before in this way, says Uta Frith of University College London. "If they succeed it would be marvellous." But she cautions that the drugs have not yet been shown to work better than behavioural interventions and that most causes of autism are still deeply mysterious.

Carpenter points out that behavioural interventions don't work for everyone, and both approaches could be useful. "If we come up with an effective treatment, parents are going to embrace that."

Non-expert treatment shown to be more effective than primary care in soothing widespread anxiety

2010-05-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

By Katherine Harmon

NEW YORK—One-size-fits-all treatments are particularly rare in the mental health world, where each patient's ailments can seem unique.

But a team of researchers seems to have found a therapeutic model to treat anxiety disorders as wide-ranging as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social phobia and panic disorder. Lead study author Dr. Peter Roy-Byrne, of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, presented the findings May 18 at a press briefing in New York convened by JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association.

When taken together, anxiety disorders affect about 18 percent of the population (which is more than twice the rate of depression). Some three fourths of people with mental disorders are managed in primary care (which Roy-Byrne called "the de facto mental health system"), but getting those patients—especially those with anxiety disorders—to see mental health specialists is much harder than getting them to see a radiologist, Roy-Byrne noted.

He and his team devised a flexible, collaborative care system that lightened loads for both doctors and psychiatrists (or psychologists) while making it easier for patients to get the help they needed. By enlisting the skills of nurses or masters-level clinicians with some training in anxiety management and an online patient progress tracking system, the treatment plan could adapt to patients without sending them to an expensive psychiatrist or psychologist, which has been shown to be especially difficult in anxiety patients (and could also allow specialists more time to address patients who most need their care). And a controlled trial, published May 19 in JAMA, showed promising results.

The researchers randomized 1,004 patients with at least one anxiety disorder (with and without major depression) to either their treatment model (which offered a choice of drug-based therapy as prescribed by overseeing doctors, computer-assisted cognitive behavioral therapy or a combination of both) or standard care (any treatment by their primary physician, recommended counselor or medication).

Patients receiving medication in the experimental group were advised about type and dosage as well as given additional guidance about healthy lifestyle habits, such as sleep hygiene and behavioral tips. Those getting cognitive behavioral therapy met with a nurse or masters-level clinician to work through a computer-guided program, which provided questions, examples and videos to guide the sessions as well as tailor and reinforce concepts. Primary care physicians and psychiatrists or psychologists oversaw the progress of patients and administrators via an online tracking system that charted attendance, performance and wellbeing so that they could follow-up or intervene if necessary.

The trial itself was open to patients' changing needs, so if patients entered the trial on ineffective levels of medication but didn't want to switch, the docs allowed them to stay on their preferred regimen. And if an experimental-group patient was not improving on a current path (of cognitive behavior therapy or pharmacological treatment), doctors could immediately see that and recommend alternative courses of action.

After a series of blinded follow-ups with patients (at six, 12 and 18 months after the start of the trial), the researchers found that with just six to eight sessions, patients in the treatment group were "averaging really negligible symptoms," he said. Fifty-one percent of people in the flexible, monitored treatment group were in remission at 18 months, compared to 36 percent of the usual care group.

The results "showed how we could use technology" to treat a broad range of anxiety disorders, Roy-Byrne noted on Tuesday. And because the treatment model was effective for a broad range of disorders, it could help the many people who have more than one ailment, "which is the rule rather than the exception," he added.

By using clinician-administered, evidence-based strategy, he said, "you can get a lot of people better fast." And the social implications of the model were not lost on Roy-Byrne. He noted that the days of the well-to-do and well-insured seeking in-depth psychiatric help for every minor mental health issue might be numbered. "How can you more responsibly distribute the expertise?" he asked. With an evidence-based treatment protocol, he concluded, the psychiatric and psychological big guns could be reserved for those who really needed them.

We are the Evil In Man

2010-05-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

A lecture by Carl G. Jung...

Mothers' Depression Can Go Well Beyond Child's Infancy

2010-05-06T16:01:00.001-07:00

Mothers' Depression Can Go Well Beyond Child's Infancy
Many mothers continue to have depressive symptoms well into their child's youth, which can have lasting impacts on their children's development, but new research shows short therapy sessions can improve outlook.

By Katherine Harmon

Vast amounts of research on postpartum depression have focused on difficulties facing new mothers, and studies of adult depression have focused on individual struggles. Depression in mothers with children over the age of six months, however, is less discussed but exceedingly common. At least 12 percent of women in any given year—many of whom are mothers—and 20 percent of disadvantaged mothers have depressive symptoms.

New findings, presented May 1 at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Vancouver, Canada, provide hope, showing that proper screening and brief cognitive behavior therapy can be a big help to both the mothers and their children.

"Anyone can be depressed," says Carol Weitzman, an associate professor of developmental-behavior pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine and lead researcher on the study. But when an adult is caring for children, depression can have large and lasting effects on the kids, making maternal depression "a big public health problem for children," she notes. "The effects of depression on children are very profound. We can't look at children's health and function without looking at parents' functioning."

Depressed moms, weak bonds
Maternal depression is not an isolated event but part of "a continuum that actually starts prenatally," explains Janice Cooper, interim director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Regardless of a child's age, "moms with depression are less able to bond well with their children," she says.

Many mothers with depression are less likely to engage positively with their children, such as playing, reading or singing. They may even have trouble managing basic child well-being tasks, such as arranging doctor's checkups, childproofing a home or buckling children up in cars. Additionally, Cooper points out, depressed parents tend to be less consistent in their parenting. As symptoms wax and wane, discipline and engagement can fluctuate, leaving children in less-stable environments. All of these behaviors can influence cognitive, social and physical development, she says.

In many instances, maternal depression can initiate what Cooper calls a "vicious cycle." When depressed mothers do not respond well to their children, the children tend not to respond well to the mother, adding to the mother's concern, anxiety and general malaise. And these feelings are more likely to increase as the child gets older, a finding that surprised even Weitzman. These growing anxieties might stem from increased concern about difficulties children might face as they get older, she hypothesizes.

Exploring options
Given the high rates of maternal depression and its impact on the mother-child bond, Weitzman and her colleagues are seeking to understand how it can be better diagnosed and treated. "I think that we should be sitting up and really taking notice when we see numbers like that," Weitzman says. "For certain kinds of disorders, we would be all over that, but we still carry a lot of stigma for mental health."

The issue of maternal depression is outsized in disadvantaged families, and depressed mothers are less likely to be employed, probably increasing stress. A combination of other factors, such as less educated parents, also put children at higher risk for poor developmental outcomes even without a depressed parent.

In the new randomized study of 71 underserved mothers with depressive symptoms, Weitzman and her team examined how several short, on-site cognitive behavior therapy sessions compared with traditional referrals for improving both maternal symptoms and how mothers rated their children's behavior.

Conventionally, observant doctors might suggest specialists for women who seem to be depressed. For the study, Weitzman and her group gave women who were randomized into this control group substantial case management, in which they spoke with a social worker and were helped with referrals. In the cognitive behavior therapy group, the social workers "tried to help people make the link from their moods and behavior to how it affected their children." The six two-hour therapy sessions covered the relationship between thought, mood, behavior and physical feelings. It got the mothers to identify stigmas, practice relaxation techniques, reduce negative thinking, and explore the link between maternal mood and behavior and child mood and behavior.

Both groups showed improvement, but the cognitive behavioral therapy group "significantly reduced their ratings of problem behavior in their young children," Weitzman and her colleagues conclude in their abstract.

"These are great findings," says Cooper, who was not involved in the study. "We know that depression is highly treatable," she notes, adding that these data give credence to other work showing the importance of diagnosing and treating disadvantaged mothers with depression.

The follow-up period for Weitzman's study did not provide long-term assessments of mother and child behavior, and as Cooper notes, not all mothers can be helped by cognitive behavior therapy. In some cases, she says, the best solution is including some joint parent-child therapy: "For some families, they really do need help developing that parent-child relationship, rebonding, reconnecting with their children."

Incorporating treatment
But finding a way to integrate both screening and treatment into an already tenuous health care environment can be challenging. "We should be bringing this stuff right into pediatrics," Weitzman says. They have found that a simple screening, whether it is via a paper survey or simple questions from a pediatrician, is feasible to incorporate into a standard well-child visit. It will help, she notes, if pediatricians are aware of some of the red flags, such as infrequent (or overly frequent) doctor visits, negative description of young children or other behavioral signals. But once doctors recognize signs of depression, there are often few resources—especially for disadvantaged families—to recommend and even fewer on-site cognitive behavior therapy programs like the one in the study. And even in their study, Weitzman notes, there were high dropout rates, which emphasize the need for treatments that are easy for families.

Beyond the challenge of providing sessions and making sure those who need treatment get it, the cost of these programs can be prohibitive. Finding a way to establish screening and treatment protocols so they are not only convenient for families and practitioners but also integrated into the reimbursement structure is likely to be difficult. Because many programs address postpartum depression through six months, it can be hard to find reimbursable programs that will address maternal and parent-child bonding in treatment, Cooper notes.

As with other diseases, however, treating it is likely to pay off in the long run. Depressed adults often miss work or have trouble retaining consistent employment, resulting in lost productivity. "We know that depression is a huge cost to our society," Cooper says. And beyond the individual, improving parental state of mind pays long-term dividends for improved child development, she notes, adding that any booster to "foster those bonds and make sure those children have the most quality early childhood experience" is a solid investment. Citing a frequently used figure for cost-benefit analysis, Cooper notes that, "for every $1 invested in early childhood, we save $8.… If you think of it in terms of prevention, this is a huge benefit to society."

First, however, the concept surrounding maternal depression needs to change, Weitzman notes. "Depression is a chronic disorder—it waxes and it wanes," she says. "We just need to expand and broaden our thinking [from the idea] that there's this short time after the birth of a baby that someone can be depressed."

Understanding Dreams

2010-05-06T09:41:00.001-07:00

Dreams about taking exam, being naked -- what they mean
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

(CNN) -- You're in a classroom and the teacher puts an exam face down on your desk. You pick it up and can't really make out what's on it; it's blurry, or it's in another language, or it's in a subject you didn't study.

You feel like you're going to fail, even though it's been years since you've actually been in school.

People commonly relive this scenario in their dreams, even decades after their last graduation. While many high school, college and graduate school students are cramming for real exams this week, you may dream about it if you have anxiety about being judged, or if you're in a situation you don't know how to handle, experts say.

Dreams are "an extremely rich source of practical advice, and other alternatives about what we're doing in our lives," said Deirdre Barrett, Harvard psychologist and author of "The Committee of Sleep" and "Trauma and Dreams." "They're just coming from such a different part of ourselves that they're a very good supplement to our waking, rational thinking."

The dreaming brain

Scientists know about as much about the dreaming brain as they do the waking brain -- in other words, there's still a lot to learn about how the brain creates the dreaming consciousness and wakeful consciousness, said William Dement, leading sleep researcher at Stanford University.

Dreaming happens during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep. In a typical sleep cycle, there are 68 minutes of non-REM sleep and 22 minutes of REM sleep. An eight-hour night of sleep will include about six REM periods, during which multiple dreams can occur.

The body is temporarily paralyzed during REM sleep. But in a rare condition called REM behavior disorder, people act out what they are doing in their dreams, be it talking or running into a wall.

You are conscious in your dreams in basically the same way you are conscious in real life, but you don't remember dreams as well because memory processing is down, Dement said. The continuity of real life experiences helps you distinguish waking life from the dream world. For example, you don't magically reappear in a different setting in the real world, whereas it might appear that way in a single night of dreaming.

"In some ways, it's very good we don't remember our dreams very well," he said. "You'd constantly be saying, 'Did that happen, or was it a dream?' "

Inside your dreams

The symbols and events in dreams can mean many different things to different people, Barrett said. A dog might signal unconditional love to someone who has positive feelings toward canines; someone else with a fear of dogs might dream about them as a reflection of trauma.

But themes such as the "test you're not prepared for" do tend to have common meanings for people. A similar dream occurs for people who had experience in acting as a child: They dream that they forgot there was an audition that day, or that they get to an audition and it's in a garbled language, or they studied the wrong script -- they're being judged, or don't know what to do in this situation. People also commonly have dreams in which they are naked in public, associated with feeling exposed or ashamed. This could signal that the dreamer feels socially inadequate in some way, Barrett said

These are "psychological dreams" that are telling you that you should figure out where in life you are having a block, or how you should handle your difficult problem, said Dr. Judith Orloff, author of "Second Sight" and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Nightmares can shed light into the dark areas of people's lives, Orloff said. They confront people with what they are most afraid of, and can be used to work through underlying problems.

Orloff had one patient who repeatedly dreamed she was being chased on a cliff by an "evil pursuer" who was going to hurt her. The patient and psychologist figured out that the pursuer represented the woman's abusive father. After working through it, the nightmare did not repeat.

Letting your dreams help you

If you want further insight into a difficult decision, consider asking a question before you go to bed, and then seeing what happens in your dream, Orloff said. Get a dream journal and write down the question at night; in the morning, without getting out of bed, write down everything you remember.

One patient of Orloff's had to make a difficult decision about whether to take a new job, and dreamed that she was in the new position but had a negative experience. This helped her realize that she did not get along with the boss, and she decided against the job, Orloff said.

Dement said he is somewhat skeptical about putting a lot of weight in dream interpretation. Dreams are often hard to remember, the associations in them can mean multiple things, and you shouldn't stress if you can't recall details, he said. It can be quite difficult to summon a memorable dream to answer a question in the way that Orloff recommends, he said.

But Dement agreed that dreams can help with major life events. He himself once had a life-changing dream: He had been trying to quit smoking, but simply could not, and dreamed that he had coughed up pink sputum indicative of cancer.

"I felt just utter complete despair -- I would never see my children grow up, I did it to myself because I didn't quit, I hadn't put enough aside to take care of my family," he said. "Then I woke up. I never smoked another cigarette."

Important discoveries have also emerged as a consequence of dreams. Otto Loewi, a German pharmacologist, is said to have dreamed about an experiment to show that the transmission of nerve impulses is chemical, not electrical. The experiment worked in real life, and Loewi went on to the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1936.

Some artists and musicians use their dreams for inspiration. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson drew on his dreams for "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

The bottom line: Trust your waking, logical thinking, but don't ignore what your intuitive, feeling-based, visual side might have to say about difficult decisions through dreams, Barrett said.

"It can be very important to look to our dreams on anything that we're kind of stuck on in our waking lives, because the dream thoughts are likely to be so different, and they may really think outside the box and come up with an answer that we haven't awake," Barrett said.

DMT is in your head, but it may be too weird for the psychedelic renaissance

2010-04-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

By John Horgan

You know that psychedelics are making a comeback when the New York Times says so on page 1. In “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In,” John Tierney reports on how doctors at schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCLA and NYU are testing the potential of psilocybin and other hallucinogens for treating depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism—and for inducing spiritual experiences.

Tierney’s brisk overview neglects to mention the most mind-bending of all psychedelics: dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. It was first synthesized by a British chemist in the 1930s, and its psychotropic properties were discovered some 20 years later by the Hungarian-born chemist Stephen Szara, who later became a researcher for the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Why is DMT so fascinating? For starters, DMT is the only psychedelic known to occur naturally in the human body. In 1972, the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health discovered DMT in human brain tissue, leading to speculation that the compound plays a role in psychosis. Research into that possibility—and into psychedelics in general--was abandoned because of the growing backlash against these compounds.

In 1990, however, Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, obtained permission from federal authorities to inject DMT into human volunteers. Strassman, a Buddhist, suspected that endogenous DMT might contribute to mystical experiences. From 1990 to 1995, he supervised more than 400 DMT sessions involving 60 subjects at the University of New Mexico. Many subjects reported that they dissolved blissfully into a radiant light or sensed the presence of a powerful, god-like being.

On the other hand, 25 subjects underwent what Strassman called “adverse effects,” including terrifying hallucinations of “aliens” that took the shape of robots, insects, or reptiles. Some subjects remained convinced that these aliens were real in spite of Strassman’s efforts to convince them otherwise. In part out of concern about these adverse effects, Strassman discontinued his research, which he describes in his 2000 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

DMT is also the primary active ingredient of ayahuasca, a tea that Amazonian tribes brew from two plants and drink as a sacred medicine. After hearing about ayahuasca from the legendary Harvard botanist Richard Shultes, the beat writer William Burroughs traveled to South America and swilled the stuff in 1953. In a letter to the poet Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs said that during his first ayahuasca trip he thought he had been poisoned, and he felt himself turning into half-man-half-woman. Burroughs nonetheless drank the tea again and praised its ability to facilitate “space time travel.”

By the mid-20th century ayahuasca had also been adopted as a sacrament by several urban sects in Brazil. The largest of these is the Uniao Do Vegetal, which combines elements of Christianity with indigenous Indian beliefs. Researchers led by the UCLA psychiatrist Charles Grob (who is mentioned in Tierney’s story) have reported that Brazilian UDV members are on average healthier physiologically and psychologically than a control group. UDV members also claimed that ayahuasca had helped them overcome alcoholism, drug addiction and other self-destructive behaviors. A decade ago, a branch of the UDV based in New Mexico sued for the right to consume ayahuasca legally in the U.S. In 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the group.

In Antipodes of the Mind, the Israeli psychologist Benny Shanon, who has consumed ayahuasca more than 100 times, provides a gripping account of his own and others’ visions. Shanon says the tea transformed him from a “devout atheist” into a spiritual believer awestruck by the mysteries of nature and the human mind. Yet Shanon, like Strassman, acknowledges that these hallucinogenic experiences pose risks. Quoting one ayahuasca shaman, Shanon warns that ayahuasca can also be “the worst of liars,” leaving some users gripped by delusions.

I drank ayahuasca a decade ago while researching my book Rational Mysticism . It tastes like stale beer dregs flavored with cigarette butts. After I threw up, I had a cosmic panic attack, in which I was menaced by malevolent, dayglo-hued polyhedra. I have no desire to repeat this experience.

I applaud the psychedelic renaissance, with this caveat: Spiritual texts often emphasize the dangers of mystical experiences, whether generated by drugs, fasting, meditation or other means. That is the theme of an old Talmudic tale in which four rabbis are brought into the presence of God. One becomes a heretic, one goes crazy, one drops dead and one returns home with his faith affirmed.

Communication Breakdown in Brain Caused by a Gene Defect May Contribute to Schizophrenia

2010-04-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

15 years after a gene defect was found to increase the risk of schizophrenia 30-fold, scientists have figured out how it might cause the brain disorder's debilitating symptoms

By Katie Moisse

More than 15 years after a genetic variant was shown to predispose its carriers to schizophrenia, scientists have finally uncovered how the chromosomal abnormality might cause symptoms of the brain disorder. By studying mice with a similar gene defect, the research team from Columbia University Medical Center linked abnormalities in behavior to a faulty connection between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex—two brain areas important for learning and memory.

"We know that this genetic deficit predisposes us to schizophrenia, and now we have identified a clear pathophysiological mechanism of how [it] confers this risk…," Maria Karayiorgou, co-author on the study published April 1 in Nature and lead author on the 1994 publication identifying the genetic variant in Brain Research, said in a prepared statement. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Thirty percent of people carrying the variant—a small deletion of genetic material on chromosome 22—will go on to develop the schizophrenia, making it "one of largest genetic risk factors" for the disease, according to senior author Joshua Gordon. The odds of someone in the general U.S. population developing the disorder are one in 100, but those odds jump to one in 10 for people with an affected first-degree relative, and one in three for people with a schizophrenic identical twin, highlighting the role of genes in the development of the disease.

People with schizophrenia suffer from a loss of contact with reality, confused thinking, delusions and hallucinations—usually hearing internal voices. Scientists think that no single gene defect causes the disease. Rather, they theorize that several genetic variations passed on haphazardly from one generation to the next are to blame, along with certain environmental factors—making it harder to understand how various neurological processes might be going wrong. But by spotting interrelated behavioral and physiological differences in their mouse model, the Columbia team has implicated communication between brain areas as one such process.

The researchers measured the neural activity between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex while normal mice and those with the genetic deletion performed a task—learning and remembering the whereabouts of a food reward on a T-shaped maze. "We found that successful completion of the task in our healthy mice required the two regions of the brain—the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex—to work together," Gordon said in a prepared statement. "And in our mouse model, the information transfer was less efficient or was unable to take place at all." The experiment even revealed a dose effect—the mice who had the least communication between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex turned in the worst performances negotiating the maze.

The researchers are excited to have discovered a possible mechanism linking the genetic variant to the behavioral deficits in schizophrenia. "We now know that one of the consequences of that deletion is to disrupt functional communication between these two brain regions, and we have evidence from the study that the disruption actually has an impact on a cognitive behavior that is disrupted in patients," said Joseph Gogos, the study's other senior author, in a prepared statement. "It is possible that similar abnormalities in functional connectivity may also account for other symptoms of the disease and can be used to better assess treatment response, and, most importantly, to develop new medications."

In addition to its role in the heightened risk for schizophrenia, "the gene deletion also increases the risk for other cognitive and psychiatric disorders," said Dolores Malaspina, a psychiatrist at New York University Langone Medical Center who was not involved in the study. The study is "an important step in illuminating how the deletion may be related to a brain dysfunction that is present in some people with mental illness," she added. "This is important information whether or not any of [the genes involved] turn out to be common causes of schizophrenia in the population."

Consciousness-Raising: Kick-Starting the Brain's Dopamine System May Revive Some Vegetative Patients

2010-03-14T21:24:00.001-07:00

News - March 12, 2010

A clinical trial seeks to determine if apomorphine, once used to treat Parkinson's symptoms, could speed recovery from certain kinds of brain trauma

By Jesse Emspak

A drug targeting dopamine receptors might be able to "kick-start" an injured brain, enabling certain kinds of vegetative and minimally conscious patients to recover faster.

Esteban Fridman of the FLENI hospital in Buenos Aires thinks the crux of the problem for such patients lies in their neuron-connecting axons. They are so badly damaged that they have a difficult time carrying chemical signals, or neurotransmitters, from neuron to neuron. Axons get disrupted when they are subject to stresses such as cranial impact—as when a fighter gets hit in the head or a driver smacks into the steering wheel in a car accident.

As a possible treatment for such damage, Fridman has focused on apomorphine, which binds to the brain's dopamine receptors. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter well known for its role in Parkinson's disease, is part of the mechanism controlling arousal and motivated behavior; it also plays a role in consciousness disorders.

Why apomorphine?
Fridman hypothesizes that apomorphine might work by acting in place of dopamine. Flooding the injured brain with the chemical might stimulate it enough to repair the connections, enabling the patients to reach full consciousness. He notes the drug wouldn't work in cases where the brain has been deprived of oxygen or blood, because the damage is more widespread. Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman whose care sparked a nationwide controversy that peaked in 2005, was in a vegetative state caused by that kind of injury.

One reason Fridman chose apomorphine was that it reaches dopamine receptors directly, even if the body's own ability to make the neurotransmitter is damaged. Apomorphine also binds to many types of dopamine receptors. Some other drugs, such as levodopa (L-dopa), are actually precursors—they are converted into dopamine by the body rather than acting directly on the receptors, so if that conversion mechanism were impaired they would be less helpful. Other drugs, such as amantadine, boost cellular production of dopamine, but if those cells are damaged or less active then they can only be boosted so far. Yet others only bind to certain dopamine receptors.

Fridman first tried apomorphine on a patient in 2004. The man had been in a minimally conscious state for 104 days. After he was given the drug the patient's mother called Fridman to tell him her son had awakened after only 24 hours.

Over the next few years, Fridman and a colleague, Ben Zion Krimchansky at the Loewenstein Hospital Rehabilitation Center in Israel tried the drug on a total of eight patients. Seven recovered consciousness. (One subsequently died of an unrelated problem.) One welcome effect, Fridman says, was that patients did not regress even after the treatment was discontinued. Five improved to where they could walk, and one can now drive by himself. Fridman published some of these results in Neurotherapeutics in 2007 as well as one of his single patient observations in Brain Injury in 2009.

But because these clinical observations were not double-blind studies—in which neither the physicians nor the patients know if subjects get a placebo or the drug—Fridman currently is starting a formal clinical study with a total of 76 patients. The apomorphine will be given between one and four months after a traumatic brain injury, and the dosages will be spread over several weeks, given over 12-hour periods. Some patients will get the drug and some will be controls.

The study is being sponsored by Boston-based Neurohealing Pharmaceuticals with initial funding from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration "orphan drug" (a pharmaceutical developed for a rare condition) grant. It is scheduled for completion later this year, although it will more likely be finished in 2011, according to Neurohealing president Daniel Katzman.

Finding what works
Apomorphine fell out of favor as a treatment for Parkinson's because the drug needs to be injected, and that made it less practical for people with tremors. On top of that, it can cause nausea. But Fridman says those problems are less of a concern with vegetative and minimally conscious patients. It is also easier to give them controlled doses over many hours.

Apomorphine isn't the only drug being researched in this way. There are current studies of amantadine, which was originally developed for treating influenza. Fridman chose apomorphine, however, because his initial group of patients did not respond to amantadine, levodopa or other drugs that act on the dopamine system.

Ross Zafonte, chairman of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard, is leading the investigation in the U.S. He says he is cautious but enthusiastic about the prospects of apomorphine. He notes it isn't clear whether the dopamine pathways are the only driver for consciousness or if it is some combination with others. He also wants to find the optimal neurotransmitter pathways to target. But this study will help show what factors lead to faster recovery from vegetative and minimally conscious states, even if it only works in a minority of patients. In addition, even if the treatment only changes the rate of recovery, it still would be a step in the right direction.

Mary McMahon, associate professor of Pediatric Rehabilitation at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, has done small-scale work with amantadine, and is not involved with Fridman and Zafonte's work. She says their trial is important to establish what drug therapies may be effective as well as to find out how much of the effect is caused by the drug and how much is through natural healing.

Antidepressants: Do They "Work" or Don't They?

2010-03-02T17:08:00.000-08:00

A new study finds little difference between pill and placebo
By John Kelley

Are antidepressants effective or ineffective? Answer: Yes!

In my view, both these statements are true: Antidepressants do work. And antidepressants don’t work. Not to put too fine a Clintonian point on it, but determining whether antidepressants work depends on the definition of the word “work.”

A controversial article just published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos for most depressed patients. Jay Fournier and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania aggregated individual patient data from six high-quality clinical trials and found that the superiority of antidepressants over placebo is clinically significant only for patients who are very severely depressed. For patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression, placebos work nearly as well as antidepressants.

There have been at least four other review articles published in the last eight years that have come to similar conclusions about the limited clinical efficacy of antidepressants, and one of the study authors, psychologist Irving Kirsch, has recently published a book on the topic, provocatively entitled The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth.
The recent review articles questioning the clinical efficacy of antidepressants run counter to the received wisdom in the psychiatric community that antidepressants are highly effective. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that psychiatrist Peter Kramer wrote in his best-selling book Listening to Prozac that this miracle drug made patients “better than well.” Prozac was a Rock Star. Its extraordinary success even led to a photograph of the green and white capsule on the cover of Newsweek Magazine in 1990.

The essential facts about antidepressant efficacy are not in dispute. In double-blind, randomized controlled trials – meaning that patients are randomly assigned to receive either drug or placebo, and neither patient nor clinician knows who gets what – antidepressants show a small but statistically significant advantage over placebos. The debate is over the interpretation of these findings, and it revolves around the distinction between clinical significance and statistical significance.

Statistical significance means that an effect is probably not due to chance and is therefore likely to be reliable. But statistical significance says nothing about the magnitude of the effect or its practical implications. Clinical significance indicates the degree to which an effect translates to a meaningful improvement in symptoms for patients. Although the superiority of antidepressants over placebos has been shown to be statistically significant, the observed differences are not clinically significant. In fact, the average difference between drug and placebo is approximately two points on a depression scale that ranges from 0 to 52. This difference does not exceed the commonly accepted standard for a minimally significant clinical improvement of a 3 point improvement on the depression scale.

But what of the testimonials from patients and their doctors reporting dramatic relief of symptoms in response to antidepressants? Such reports really aren’t in conflict with the data from randomized controlled trials. In clinical trials, patients treated with antidepressants do show substantial improvement from baseline. However, the clinical trial data also show that patients treated with placebos improve about 75% as much as patients treated with antidepressants, suggesting that only a quarter of the improvement shown by patients treated with antidepressants is actually attributable to the specific effect of the drugs. The rest of the improvement is a placebo response. In clinical practice, of course, there is no placebo group, and therefore patients and their doctors are likely to attribute all symptom improvement to the medication.

What seems clear from double-blind, randomized controlled trials is that antidepressants are, on average, only marginally superior to placebos. One might reasonably ask, however, whether there might be a sub-set of patients for whom antidepressants are highly effective. This is certainly possible, but to date no one has been able to reliably predict which subset of patients will respond best.

Moreover, because average antidepressant efficacy is small and not clinically significant, if there is a sub-set of patients for whom antidepressants are highly effective, there must also be a sub-set of patients for whom antidepressants have no effect, or are even harmful. In addition, since pharmaceutical companies are now the major sponsors of drug trials, and they have an interest in maximizing the number of people for whom their medications can be prescribed, they have little interest in performing any trials whose aim would be to identify such sub-sets of patients. To do so would risk reducing their profits.

Some have suggested that critics of antidepressant efficacy should keep quiet and not publicize their work. The reasoning is that if the effectiveness of antidepressants depends in large part on the faith of patients and their doctors, then publicizing the fact that antidepressants appear to have only minimal efficacy as compared to placebos will have the practical effect of harming patients. But this is putting our heads in the sand. The history of medicine is littered with treatments initially thought effective that we now know to be ineffective at best and actually harmful at worst (For example, bloodletting contributed to the death of George Washington). To ignore the evidence, is to return to a pre-scientific form of medicine. In the long run, this will not be beneficial to patients.

So what’s the bottom line? In clinical practice, many people suffering from depression improve after taking antidepressants. But the evidence indicates that much of that improvement is a placebo response. Antidepressants do work in the sense that many patients in clinical practice show substantial improvement. However, if the standard is efficacy in comparison to placebo, the best available scientific evidence suggests that antidepressants do not work very well. Given their cost and side effects, the psychiatric community and the general public should not be satisfied with antidepressant medications that provide only a marginal benefit over placebo.

Indeed, as early as 1994, Brown University School of Medicine psychiatrist Walter Brown suggested treating mild to moderately depressed patients with placebos for an initial 4-6 week period, and then switching to active medications if patients did not improve. To surmount ethical concerns, Brown proposed prescribing placebos openly by informing patients that clinical trials showed that many depressed patients improved after being treated with placebos, and asking whether they would like to try a placebo initially. It’s been sixteen years since Brown offered up his radical prescription for harnessing the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Is it time to fill the prescription?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Clinical psychologist John Kelley is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Endicott College and an Instructor in the Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School whose research focuses on placebo effects in medicine and psychiatry.

You won't find consciousness in the brain - opinion - 07 January 2010 - New Scientist

2010-01-21T23:24:00.000-08:00

You won't find consciousness in the brain - opinion - 07 January 2010 - New Scientist

Debate over cognitive, traditional mental health therapy

2010-01-11T22:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-psychotherapy11-2010jan11,0,7709352,full.story

Psychologists who favor the more medical-minded cognitive behavioral model point to growing evidence of its efficacy. Proponents of psychoanalysis deride a one-size-fits-all approach.

By Eric Jaffe

January 11, 2010

If your doctor advised a treatment that involved leeches and bloodletting, you might take a second glance at that diploma on the wall. For the same reason, you should think twice about whom you see as a therapist, says a team of psychological researchers.

In a November report that's attracting controversy the way couches attract loose change, three professors charge that many mental health practitioners are using antiquated, unproved methods and that many clinical psychology training programs lack scientific rigor.

The accusation has reignited a long-standing "holy war" within the psychological profession.

On the one side sit the report's authors and other like-minded psychologists who say that too many clinicians favor personal experience over scientific evidence when deciding on a patient's treatment. They are particularly unsettled by the number of therapists -- especially from training programs that grant a higher degree known as doctor of psychology, or PsyD -- who ignore the most-studied type of treatment: cognitive behavioral therapy.

"Too many clinical psychologists tell us they don't look to research, they don't look to science," says Timothy Baker of the University of Wisconsin, lead author of the report, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

On the other side of the fight are psychologists who say that what matters most is not the type but the quality of mental health treatment and who fear that the push toward cognitive behavioral therapy -- which is cheaper but not effective for everyone -- is being used by insurance companies to cut down on costs.

The new report's authors and their supporters "are largely people who not only don't practice themselves -- and therefore have no idea what would be relevant to practice -- but have a tremendous disdain for people who do practice," says psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University.

The debate comes at a critical moment in mental health care. In the last 20 years, the treatment rate for people with mental disorders has nearly doubled. In October, a long-term Duke University study reported that some afflictions -- including depression and anxiety disorder -- affect twice as many as previously believed.

The situation stands to worsen. The National Alliance on Mental Illness recently found that the unemployed were four times as likely as job holders to report symptoms of mental illness. A need for clinicians capable of treating post-traumatic stress disorder will rise dramatically as more soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Many people in the general public are not getting ideal care," says psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld of Emory University. He describes the new report as an "accumulation of frustration."

Medical standard

At the core of the debate is a difference over how clinical psychologists approach therapeutic practice.

One group, largely academic, believes psychology should follow a medical model, addressing specific ailments with specific treatments developed and tested for that purpose. This group overwhelmingly embraces cognitive behavioral therapy that -- briefly put -- aims to correct misguided beliefs and reactions that contribute to mental disorders.

Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, are treated with a type of cognitive behavioral therapy known as exposure therapy, which gradually teaches them to confront their fear of contamination. Only after symptoms have been alleviated do therapist and patient then delve into the root of the problem -- a place where many traditional therapists begin.

A mounting pile of research shows that cognitive behavioral therapy can effectively treat anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, bulimia and substance abuse problems. The method has performed as well as antidepressant medication in treating depression in recent studies. What's more, patients receiving cognitive behavioral therapy have shown less likelihood of relapse than their medicated peers because the therapy teaches them how to handle their disorder.

"Evidence-based therapies work a little faster, a little better, and for more problematic situations, more powerfully," says psychologist Steven D. Hollon of Vanderbilt University.

Research shows that many patients respond to the therapy within 12 to 16 sessions, far more quickly than in traditional psychoanalysis, making the treatment highly cost-effective.

England is convinced. In 2007, the British government -- a "decade ahead of us," Hollon says -- adopted a massive program to train 3,600 therapists in cognitive behavioral therapy with the hope of weaning 900,000 people off medication.

But U.S. therapists have been reluctant to embrace the technique. A survey of 591 practitioners, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2007, found they relied "primarily on clinical experiences," as opposed to new research, when treating patients. The therapists stuck with methods that hadn't been confirmed in randomized controlled trials, says the study's co-author, Dianne L. Chambless of the University of Pennsylvania.

As a result, she says, many people are suffering from mental health problems who wouldn't be if their therapists "provided the right kinds of treatments."

Traditional mode

That is not how the other camp sees the situation. This group, largely practicing therapists, prefers a less confining treatment method that emphasizes a strong relationship between therapist and patient. It tends to favor more traditional approaches such as psychodynamic therapy, in which the therapist plumbs the patient's unconscious, or humanistic therapy, which stresses self-determination.

This camp says that these methods are harder to test than cognitive behavioral therapy, which follows a step-by-step treatment plan.

The scientific reputation of cognitive behavioral therapy has left many with the impression that all other therapies are unproved -- quack methods, invented by clinicians on the fly -- but that's sensationalism, says psychologist John Norcross of the University of Scranton, Pa. He says there's plenty of support for traditional psychotherapies from careful case studies and data collected by therapists working in clinics.

And just because cognitive behavioral therapy has performed well in randomized controlled research doesn't make it "right," Norcross and others add. Its one-size-fits-all approach denies that different people may need different strategies for dealing with similar mental health problems.

"[Cognitive-behavior therapy] is deliberately designed to ignore any relevant features of the personality of the individual," Westen says.

In an October review of scientific literature in the Behavior Therapist, three psychologists argue that cognitive behavioral studies contain flaws -- dropout rates are as high as 40%, for example. This leaves only patients well-suited to the treatment as test subjects.

And some significant studies are not included in the new report, adds one of those three psychologists, Bruce Wampold of the University of Wisconsin. He cites a 2003 University of Toronto study that tested cognitive behavioral therapy against process-experiential therapy, which focuses on emotions rather than rational thoughts. Both treatments improved depression, but patients receiving process-experiential therapy reported a greater decrease in interpersonal problems.

"Frankly, it baffles me that they can ignore so much research evidence so cavalierly," Wampold says.

'Outcomes' method

Maybe there's a middle way through the morass. Instead of rigidly dictating the "right" type of therapy up front, some health plans have shifted toward an "outcomes" system that measures a patient's response to treatment regardless of what kind it is.

In Utah, for instance, publicly funded healthcare plans follow the Outcome Questionnaire system developed by psychologist Michael Lambert of Brigham Young University.

In his system, patients respond to questionnaires designed to track the effectiveness of their therapy. Each week over the course of their treatment, patients rate the frequency of 45 "mental health vital signs," such as "I blame myself for things" or "I am satisfied with my relationships." If patients aren't improving, an alarm signal is sent to therapists, asking them to consider modifying their approach.

The outcomes movement has some traction. Scott D. Miller, a psychologist in Chicago, has co-developed a similar system called MyOutcomes, used by the U.S. military and in thousands of private practices. OptumHealth, which covers 58 million Americans, now uses a similar outcomes process called the ALERT system.

Improvement, after all, matters more than how the change was achieved.

"I don't care what psychotherapy the person is getting," Lambert says. "I care whether they're responding."

health@latimes.com

Human evolution at the crossroads

2009-09-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

Genetics, cybernetics complicate forecast for species
By Alan Boyle, Science editor, updated 3:00 p.m. PT, Mon., May 2, 2005

Scientists are fond of running the evolutionary clock backward, using DNA analysis and the fossil record to figure out when our ancestors stood erect and split off from the rest of the primate evolutionary tree.

But the clock is running forward as well. So where are humans headed?
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says it's the question he's most often asked, and "a question that any prudent evolutionist will evade." But the question is being raised even more frequently as researchers study our past and contemplate our future.

Paleontologists say that anatomically modern humans may have at one time shared the Earth with as many as three other closely related types — Neanderthals, Homo erectus and the dwarf hominids whose remains were discovered last year in Indonesia.
Does evolutionary theory allow for circumstances in which "spin-off" human species could develop again?

Some think the rapid rise of genetic modification could be just such a circumstance. Others believe we could blend ourselves with machines in unprecedented ways — turning natural-born humans into an endangered species.

Present-day fact, not science fictionSuch ideas may sound like little more than science-fiction plot lines. But trend-watchers point out that we're already wrestling with real-world aspects of future human development, ranging from stem-cell research to the implantation of biocompatible computer chips. The debates are likely to become increasingly divisive once all the scientific implications sink in.

"These issues touch upon religion, upon politics, upon values," said Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the University of California at Los Angeles. "This is about our vision of the future, essentially, and we'll never completely agree about those things."

The problem is, scientists can't predict with precision how our species will adapt to changes over the next millennium, let alone the next million years. That's why Dawkins believes it's imprudent to make a prediction in the first place.

Others see it differently: In the book "Future Evolution," University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward argues that we are making ourselves virtually extinction-proof by bending Earth's flora and fauna to our will. And assuming that the human species will be hanging around for at least another 500 million years, Ward and others believe there are a few most likely scenarios for the future, based on a reading of past evolutionary episodes and current trends.

Where are humans headed? Here's an imprudent assessment of five possible paths, ranging from homogenized humans to alien-looking hybrids bred for interstellar travel.
Unihumans: Will we all be assimilated?Biologists say that different populations of a species have to be isolated from each other in order for those populations to diverge into separate species. That's the process that gave rise to 13 different species of "Darwin's Finches" in the Galapagos Islands. But what if the human species is so widespread there's no longer any opening for divergence?

Evolution is still at work. But instead of diverging, our gene pool has been converging for tens of thousands of years — and Stuart Pimm, an expert on biodiversity at Duke University, says that trend may well be accelerating.

"The big thing that people overlook when speculating about human evolution is that the raw matter for evolution is variation," he said. "We are going to lose that variability very quickly, and the reason is not quite a genetic argument, but it's close. At the moment we humans speak something on the order of 6,500 languages. If we look at the number of languages we will likely pass on to our children, that number is 600."

Cultural diversity, as measured by linguistic diversity, is fading as human society becomes more interconnected globally, Pimm argued. "I do think that we are going to become much more homogeneous," he said.

Ken Miller, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, agreed: "We have become a kind of animal monoculture."

Is that such a bad thing? A global culture of Unihumans could seem heavenly if we figure out how to achieve long-term political and economic stability and curb population growth. That may require the development of a more "domesticated" society — one in which our rough genetic edges are smoothed out.

But like other monocultures, our species could be more susceptible to quick-spreading diseases, as last year's bird flu epidemic illustrated.

"The genetic variability that we have protects us against suffering from massive harm when some bug comes along," Pimm said. "This idea of breeding the super-race, like breeding the super-race of corn or rice or whatever — the long-term consequences of that could be quite scary."

Environmental pressures wouldn't stopEven a Unihuman culture would have to cope with evolutionary pressures from the environment, the University of Washington's Peter Ward said.
Some environmentalists say toxins that work like estrogens are already having an effect: Such agents, found in pesticides and industrial PCBs, have been linked to earlier puberty for women, increased incidence of breast cancer and lower sperm counts for men.

"One of the great frontiers is going to be trying to keep humans alive in a much more toxic world," he observed from his Seattle office. "The whales of Puget Sound are the most toxic whales on Earth. Puget Sound is just a huge cesspool. Well, imagine if that goes global."
Global epidemics or dramatic environmental changes represent just two of the scenarios that could cause a Unihuman society to crack, putting natural selection — or perhaps not-so-natural selection — back into the evolutionary game. Then what?

Survivalistians: Coping with doomsdaySurviving doomsday is a story as old as Noah’s Ark, and as new as the post-bioapocalypse movie “28 Days Later.”

Catastrophes ranging from super-floods to plagues to nuclear war to asteroid strikes erase civilization as we know it, leaving remnants of humanity who go their own evolutionary ways.
The classic Darwinian version of the story may well be H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” in which humanity splits off into two species: the ruthless, underground Morlock and the effete, surface-dwelling Eloi.

At least for modern-day humans, the forces that lead to species spin-offs have been largely held in abeyance: Populations are increasingly in contact with each other, leading to greater gene-mixing. Humans are no longer threatened by predators their own size, and medicine cancels out inherited infirmities ranging from hemophilia to nearsightedness.
“We are helping genes that would have dropped out of the gene pool,” paleontologist Peter Ward observed.

But in Wells’ tale and other science-fiction stories, a civilization-shattering catastrophe serves to divide humanity into separate populations, vulnerable once again to selection pressures. For example, people who had more genetic resistance to viral disease would be more likely to pass on that advantage to their descendants.

If different populations develop in isolation over many thousands of generations, it’s conceivable that separate species would emerge. For example, that virus-resistant strain of post-humans might eventually thrive in the wake of a global bioterror crisis, while less hardy humans would find themselves quarantined in the world’s safe havens.
Patterns in the spread of the virus that causes AIDS may hint at earlier, less catastrophic episodes of natural selection, said Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University:

“There are pockets of people who don’t seem to become HIV-positive, even though they have a lot of exposure to the virus — and that may be because their ancestors survived the plague 500 years ago.”

Evolution, or devolution?If the catastrophe ever came, could humanity recover? In science fiction, that’s an intriguingly open question. For example, Stephen Baxter’s novel “Evolution” foresees an environmental-military meltdown so severe that, over the course of 30 million years, humans devolve into separate species of eyeless mole-men, neo-apes and elephant-people herded by their super-rodent masters.

Even Ward gives himself a little speculative leeway in his book “Future Evolution,” where a time-traveling human meets his doom 10 million years from now at the hands — or in this case, the talons — of a flock of intelligent killer crows. But Ward finds it hard to believe that even a global catastrophe would keep human populations isolated long enough for our species to split apart.

“Unless we totally forget how to build a boat, we can quickly come back,” Ward said.
Even in the event of a post-human split-off, evolutionary theory dictates that one species would eventually subjugate, assimilate or eliminate their competitors for the top job in the global ecosystem. Just ask the Neanderthals.

“If you have two species competing over the same ecological niche, it ends badly for one of them, historically,” said Joel Garreau, the author of the forthcoming book “Radical Evolution.”
The only reason chimpanzees still exist today is that they “had the brains to stay up in the trees and not come down into the open grasslands,” he noted.

“You have this optimistic view that you’re not going to see speciation (among humans), and I desperately hope that’s right,” Garreau said. “But that’s not the only scenario.”

Numans: Rise of the superhumansWe’ve already seen the future of enhanced humans, and his name is Barry Bonds.

The controversy surrounding the San Francisco Giants slugger, and whether steroids played a role in the bulked-up look that he and other baseball players have taken on, is only a foretaste of what’s coming as scientists find new genetic and pharmacological ways to improve performance.
Developments in the field are coming so quickly that social commentator Joel Garreau argues that they represent a new form of evolution. This radical kind of evolution moves much more quickly than biological evolution, which can take millions of years, or even cultural evolution, which works on a scale of hundreds or thousands of years.

How long before this new wave of evolution spawns a new kind of human? “Try 20 years,” Garreau told MSNBC.com. In his latest book, “Radical Evolution,” Garreau reels off a litany of high-tech enhancements, ranging from steroid Supermen, to camera-equipped flying drones, to pills that keep soldiers going without sleep or food for days.

“If you look at the superheroes of the ’30s and the ’40s, just about all of the technologies they had exist today,” he said. Three kinds of humansSuch enhancements are appearing first on the athletic field and the battlefield, Garreau said, but eventually they’ll make their way to the collegiate scene, the office scene and even the dating scene.

“You’re talking about three different kinds of humans: the enhanced, the naturals and the rest,” Garreau said. “The enhanced are defined as those who have the money and enthusiasm to make themselves live longer, be smarter, look sexier. That’s what you’re competing against.”
In Garreau’s view of the world, the naturals will be those who eschew enhancements for higher reasons, just as vegetarians forgo meat and fundamentalists forgo what they see as illicit pleasures. Then there’s all the rest of us, who don’t get enhanced only because they can’t. “They loathe and despise the people who do, and they also envy them,” Garreau said.
Scientists acknowledge that some of the medical enhancements on the horizon could engender a “have vs. have not” attitude.

“But I could be a smart ass and ask how that’s different from what we have now,” said Brown University’s Ken Miller. Medical advances as equalizers Miller went on to point out that in the past, “advances in medical science have actually been great levelers of social equality.” For example, age-old scourges such as smallpox and polio have been eradicated, thanks to public health efforts in poorer as well as richer countries. That trend is likely to continue as scientists learn more about the genetic roots of disease, he said.

“In terms of making genetic modifications to ourselves, it’s much more likely we’ll start to tinker with genes for disease susceptibility. … Maybe there would be a long-term health project to breed HIV-resistant people,” he said.

When it comes to discussing ways to enhance humans, rather than simply make up for disabilities, the traits targeted most often are longevity and memory. Scientists have already found ways to enhance those traits in mice.

Imagine improvements that could keep you in peak working condition past the age of 100. Those are the sorts of enhancements you might want to pass on to your descendants — and that could set the stage for reproductive isolation and an eventual species split-off.
“In that scenario, why would you want your kid to marry somebody who would not pass on the genes that allowed your grandchildren to have longevity, too?” the University of Washington’s
Peter Ward asked.

But that would require crossing yet another technological and ethical frontier.
Instant superhumans — or monsters?To date, genetic medicine has focused on therapies that work on only one person at a time. The effects of those therapies aren’t carried on to future generations. For example, if you take muscle-enhancing drugs, or even undergo gene therapy for bigger muscles, that doesn’t mean your children will have similarly big muscles.
In order to make an enhancement inheritable, you’d have to have new code spliced into your germline stem cells — creating an ethical controversy of transcendent proportions.
Tinkering with the germline could conceivably produce a superhuman species in a single generation — but could also conceivably create a race of monsters. “It is totally unpredictable,” Ward said. “It’s a lot easier to understand evolutionary happenstance.”

Even then, there are genetic traits that are far more difficult to produce than big muscles or even super-longevity — for instance, the very trait that defines us as humans.
“It’s very, very clear that intelligence is a pretty subtle thing, and it’s clear that we don’t have a single gene that turns it on or off,” Miller said.

When it comes to intelligence, some scientists say, the most likely route to our future enhancement — and perhaps our future competition as well — just might come from our own machines.

Cyborgs: Merging with the machinesWill intelligent machines be assimilated, or will humans be eliminated?

Until a few years ago, that question was addressed only in science-fiction plot lines, but today the rapid pace of cybernetic change has led some experts to worry that artificial intelligence may outpace Homo sapiens’ natural smarts.

The pace of change is often stated in terms of Moore’s Law, which says that the number of transistors packed into a square inch should double every 18 months. “Moore’s Law is now on its 30th doubling. We have never seen that sort of exponential increase before in human history,” said Joel Garreau, author of the book “Radical Evolution.”

In some fields, artificial intelligence has already bested humans — with Deep Blue’s 1997 victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov providing a vivid example.
Three years later, computer scientist Bill Joy argued in an influential Wired magazine essay that we would soon face challenges from intelligent machines as well as from other technologies ranging from weapons of mass destruction to self-replicating nanoscale “gray goo.”
Joy speculated that a truly intelligent robot may arise by the year 2030. “And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species — to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself,” he wrote.

Assimilating the robotsTo others, it seems more likely that we could become part-robot ourselves: We’re already making machines that can be assimilated — including prosthetic limbs, mechanical hearts, cochlear implants and artificial retinas. Why couldn’t brain augmentation be added to the list?

“The usual suggestions are that we’ll design improvements to ourselves,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. “We’ll put additional chips in our head, and we won’t get lost, and we’ll be able to do all those math problems that used to befuddle us.”
Shostak, who writes about the possibilities for cybernetic intelligence in his book “Sharing the Universe,” thinks that’s likely to be a transitional step at best.

“My usual response is that, well, you can improve horses by putting four-cylinder engines in them. But eventually you can do without the horse part,” he said. “These hybrids just don’t strike me as having a tremendous advantage. It just means the machines aren’t good enough.”
Back to biologyUniversity of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward also believes human-machine hybrids aren’t a long-term option, but for different reasons.

“When you talk to people in the know, they think cybernetics will become biology,” he said. “So you’re right back to biology, and the easiest way to make changes is by manipulating genomes.”
It’s hard to imagine that robots would ever be given enough free rein to challenge human dominance, but even if they did break free, Shostak has no fear of a “Terminator”-style battle for the planet.

“I’ve got a couple of goldfish, and I don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m gonna kill these guys.’ … I just leave ’em alone,” Shostak said. “I suspect the machines would very quickly get to a level where we were kind of irrelevant, so I don’t fear them. But it does mean that we’re no longer No. 1 on the planet, and we’ve never had that happen before.”
Astrans: Turning into an alien raceIf humans survive long enough, there’s one sure way to grow new branches on our evolutionary family tree: by spreading out to other planets.
Habitable worlds beyond Earth could be a 23rd century analog to the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary laboratory: just barely close enough for travelers to get to, but far enough away that there'd be little gene-mixing with the parent species.

“If we get off to the stars, then yes, we will have speciation,” said University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward. “But can we ever get off the Earth?”
Currently, the closest star system thought to have a planet is Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years away. Even if spaceships could travel at 1 percent the speed of light — an incredible 6.7 million mph — it would take more than a millennium to get there.

Even Mars might be far enough: If humans established a permanent settlement there, the radically different living conditions would change the evolutionary equation. For example, those who are born and raised in one-third of Earth’s gravity could never feel at home on the old “home planet.” It wouldn’t take long for the new Martians to become a breed apart.
As for distant stars, the SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak has already been thinking through the possibilities:

· Build a big ark: Build a spaceship big enough to carry an entire civilization to the destination star system. The problem is, that environment might be just too unnatural for natural humans. “If you talk to the sociologists, they’ll say that it will not work. … You’ll be lucky if anybody’s still alive after the third generation,” Shostak said.
· Go to warp speed: Somehow we discover a wormhole or find a way to travel at relativistic speeds. “That sounds OK, except for the fact that nobody knows how to do it,” Shostak said.
· Enter the Astrans: Humans are genetically engineered to tolerate ultra long-term hibernation aboard robotic ships. Once the ship reaches its destination, these “Astrans” are awakened to start the work of settling a new world. “That’s one possibility,” Shostak said.

The ultimate approach would be to send the instructions for making humans rather than the humans themselves, Shostak said. “We’re not going to put anything in a rocket, we’re just going to beam ourselves to the stars,” he explained. “The only trouble is, if there’s nobody on the other end to put you back together, there’s no point.”

So are we back to square one? Not necessarily, Shostak said. Setting up the receivers on other stars is no job for a human, “but the machines could make it work.”
In fact, if any other society is significantly further along than ours, such a network might be up and running by now. “The machines really could develop large tracts of galactic real estate, whereas it’s really hard for biology to travel,” Shostak said.

It all seems inconceivable, but if humans really are extinction-proof — if they manage to survive global catastrophes, genetic upheavals and cybernetic challenges — who’s to say what will be inconceivable millions of years from now? Two intelligent species, human and machine, just might work together to spread life through the universe.

“If you were sufficiently motivated,” Shostak said, “you could in fact keep it going forever.”

© 2009 msnbc.com Reprints URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7103668/

The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

2009-09-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

By SARA CORBETT
New York Times

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Banhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes it to the surface.

Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.

Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.

A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists.

Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture at the time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young family, a thriving private practice and a big, elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to teeter and slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a life-altering crisis.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”

Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. When he died in 1961, he left no specific instructions about what to do with it. His son, Franz, an architect and the third of Jung’s five children, took over running the house and chose to leave the book, with its strange musings and elaborate paintings, where it was. Later, in 1984, the family transferred it to the bank, where since then it has fulminated as both an asset and a liability.

Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.”

And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.

STEPHEN MARTIN IS a compact, bearded man of 57. He has a buoyant, irreverent wit and what feels like a fully intact sense of wonder. If you happen to have a conversation with him anytime before, say, 10 a.m., he will ask his first question — “How did you sleep?” — and likely follow it with a second one — “Did you dream?” Because for Martin, as it is for all Jungian analysts, dreaming offers a barometric reading of the psyche. At his house in a leafy suburb of Philadelphia, Martin keeps five thick books filled with notations on and interpretations of all the dreams he had while studying to be an analyst 30 years ago in Zurich, under the tutelage of a Swiss analyst then in her 70s named Liliane Frey-Rohn. These days, Martin stores his dreams on his computer, but his dream life is — as he says everybody’s dream life should be — as involving as ever.

Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin is unapologetically reverential. He keeps Jung’s 20 volumes of collected works on a shelf at home. He rereads “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” at least twice a year. Many years ago, when one of his daughters interviewed him as part of a school project and asked what his religion was, Martin, a nonobservant Jew, answered, “Oh, honey, I’m a Jungian.”

The first time I met him, at the train station in Ardmore, Pa., Martin shook my hand and thoughtfully took my suitcase. “Come,” he said. “I’ll take you to see the holy hankie.” We then walked several blocks to the office where Martin sees clients. The room was cozy and cavelike, with a thick rug and walls painted a deep, handsome shade of blue. There was a Mission-style sofa and two upholstered chairs and an espresso machine in one corner.

Several mounted vintage posters of Zurich hung on the walls, along with framed photographs of Carl Jung, looking wise and white-haired, and Liliane Frey-Rohn, a round-faced woman smiling maternally from behind a pair of severe glasses.

Martin tenderly lifted several first-edition books by Jung from a shelf, opening them so I could see how they had been inscribed to Frey-Rohn, who later bequeathed them to Martin. Finally, we found ourselves standing in front of a square frame hung on the room’s far wall, another gift from his former analyst and the centerpiece of Martin’s Jung arcana. Inside the frame was a delicate linen square, its crispness worn away by age — a folded handkerchief with the letters “CGJ” embroidered neatly in one corner in gray. Martin pointed. “There you have it,” he said with exaggerated pomp, “the holy hankie, the sacred nasal shroud of C. G. Jung.”

In addition to practicing as an analyst, Martin is the director of the Philemon Foundation, which focuses on preparing the unpublished works of Carl Jung for publication, with the Red Book as its central project. He has spent the last several years aggressively, sometimes evangelistically, raising money in the Jungian community to support his foundation. The foundation, in turn, helped pay for the translating of the book and the addition of a scholarly apparatus — a lengthy introduction and vast network of footnotes — written by a London-based historian named Sonu Shamdasani, who serves as the foundation’s general editor and who spent about three years persuading the family to endorse the publication of the book and to allow him access to it.

Given the Philemon Foundation’s aim to excavate and make public C. G. Jung’s old papers — lectures he delivered at Zurich’s Psychological Club or unpublished letters, for example — both Martin and Shamdasani, who started the foundation in 2003, have worked to develop a relationship with the Jung family, the owners and notoriously protective gatekeepers of Jung’s works. Martin echoed what nearly everybody I met subsequently would tell me about working with Jung’s descendants. “It’s sometimes delicate,” he said, adding by way of explanation, “They are very Swiss.”

What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung family who work most actively on maintaining Jung’s estate tend to do things carefully and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum and are on occasion taken aback by the relatively brazen and totally informal way that American Jungians — who it is safe to say are the most ardent of all Jungians — inject themselves into the family’s business. There are Americans knocking unannounced on the door of the family home in Küsnacht; Americans scaling the fence at Bollingen, the stone tower Jung built as a summer residence farther south on the shore of Lake Zurich. Americans pepper Ulrich Hoerni, one of Jung’s grandsons who manages Jung’s editorial and archival matters through a family foundation, almost weekly with requests for various permissions. The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red Book — which on one hand described Jung’s self-analysis and became the genesis for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange enough to possibly embarrass the family — held a certain electrical charge. Martin recognized the descendants’ quandary. “They own it, but they haven’t lived it,” he said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it.” Even the old psychiatrist himself seemed to recognize the tension. “Thank God I am Jung,” he is rumored once to have said, “and not a Jungian.”

“This guy, he was a bodhisattva,” Martin said to me that day. “This is the greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells the story of his inner life.” He added, “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book, but for him that made it all the more tantalizing. His hope was that the Red Book would “reinvigorate” Jungian psychology, or at the very least bring himself personally closer to Jung. “Will I understand it?” he said. “Probably not. Will it disappoint? Probably. Will it inspire? How could it not?” He paused a moment, seeming to think it through. “I want to be transformed by it,” he said finally. “That’s all there is.”

IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND and decode the Red Book — a process he says required more than five years of concentrated work — Sonu Shamdasani took long, rambling walks on London’s Hampstead Heath. He would translate the book in the morning, then walk miles in the park in the afternoon, his mind trying to follow the rabbit’s path Jung had forged through his own mind.

Shamdasani is 46. He has thick black hair, a punctilious eye for detail and an understated, even somnolent, way of speaking. He is friendly but not particularly given to small talk. If Stephen Martin is — in Jungian terms — a “feeling type,” then Shamdasani, who teaches at the University College London’s Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine and keeps a book by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus by his sofa for light reading, is a “thinking type.” He has studied Jungian psychology for more than 15 years and is particularly drawn to the breadth of Jung’s psychology and his knowledge of Eastern thought, as well as the historical richness of his era, a period when visionary writing was more common, when science and art were more entwined and when Europe was slipping into the psychic upheaval of war. He tends to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he deems guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally unsentimental attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him, at times, awkward company among both Jungians and Jungs.

The relationship between historians and the families of history’s luminaries is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side works to extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls. Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s literary executor and last living heir, has compared scholars and biographers to “rats and lice.” Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri recently told an interviewer that he considered destroying his father’s last known novel in order to rescue it from the “monstrous nincompoops” who had already picked over his father’s life and works. T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Fletcher, has actively kept his papers out of the hands of biographers, and Anna Freud was, during her lifetime, notoriously selective about who was allowed to read and quote from her father’s archives.

Even against this backdrop, the Jungs, led by Ulrich Hoerni, the chief literary administrator, have distinguished themselves with their custodial vigor. Over the years, they have tried to interfere with the publication of books perceived to be negative or inaccurate (including one by the award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair), engaged in legal standoffs with Jungians and other academics over rights to Jung’s work and maintained a state of high agitation concerning the way C. G. Jung is portrayed. Shamdasani was initially cautious with Jung’s heirs. “They had a retinue of people coming to them and asking to see the crown jewels,” he told me in London this summer. “And the standard reply was, ‘Get lost.’ ”

Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.

While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared, might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”

For about two years, Shamdasani flew back and forth to Zurich, making his case to Jung’s heirs. He had lunches and coffees and delivered a lecture. Finally, after what were by all accounts tense deliberations inside the family, Shamdasani was given a small salary and a color copy of the original book and was granted permission to proceed in preparing it for publication, though he was bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. When money ran short in 2003, the Philemon Foundation was created to finance Shamdasani’s research.

Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade, Shamdasani — who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz — these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only very recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him this summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was just adding his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.

The footnotes map both Shamdasani’s journey and Jung’s. They include references to Faust, Keats, Ovid, the Norse gods Odin and Thor, the Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, the Greek goddess Hecate, ancient Gnostic texts, Greek Hyperboreans, King Herod, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, astrology, the artist Giacometti and the alchemical formulation of gold. And that’s just naming a few. The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.

“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red Book. Creating the book also led Jung to reformulate how he worked with clients, as evidenced by an entry Shamdasani found in a self-published book written by a former client, in which she recalls Jung’s advice for processing what went on in the deeper and sometimes frightening parts of her mind.

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

ZURICH IS, IF NOTHING ELSE, one of Europe’s more purposeful cities. Its church bells clang precisely; its trains glide in and out on a flawless schedule. There are crowded fondue restaurants and chocolatiers and rosy-cheeked natives breezily pedaling their bicycles over the stone bridges that span the Limmat River. In summer, white-sailed yachts puff around Lake Zurich; in winter, the Alps glitter on the horizon. And during the lunch hour year-round, squads of young bankers stride the Banhofstrasse in their power suits and high-end watches, appearing eternally mindful of the fact that beneath everyone’s feet lie labyrinthine vaults stuffed with a dazzling and disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth.

But there, too, ventilating the city’s material splendor with their devotion to dreams, are the Jungians. Some 100 Jungian analysts practice in and around Zurich, examining their clients’ dreams in sessions held in small offices tucked inside buildings around the city. Another few hundred analysts in training can be found studying at one of the two Jungian institutes in the area. More than once, I have been told that, in addition to being a fantastic tourist destination and a good place to hide money, Zurich is an excellent city for dreaming.

Jungians are accustomed to being in the minority pretty much everywhere they go, but here, inside a city of 370,000, they have found a certain quiet purchase. Zurich, for Jungians, is spiritually loaded. It’s a kind of Jerusalem, the place where C. G. Jung began his career, held seminars, cultivated an inner circle of disciples, developed his theories of the psyche and eventually grew old. Many of the people who enroll in the institutes are Swiss, American, British or German, but some are from places like Japan and South Africa and Brazil. Though there are other Jungian institutes in other cities around the world offering diploma programs, learning the techniques of dream analysis in Zurich is a little bit like learning to hit a baseball in Yankee Stadium. For a believer, the place alone conveys a talismanic grace.

Just as I had, Stephen Martin flew to Zurich the week the Red Book was taken from its bank-vault home and moved to a small photo studio near the opera house to be scanned, page by page, for publication. (A separate English translation along with Shamdasani’s introduction and footnotes will be included at the back of the book.) Martin already made a habit of visiting Zurich a few times a year for “bratwurst and renewal” and to attend to Philemon Foundation business. My first morning there, we walked around the older parts of Zurich, before going to see the book. Zurich made Martin nostalgic. It was here that he met his wife, Charlotte, and here that he developed the almost equally important relationship with his analyst, Frey-Rohn, carrying himself and his dreams to her office two or three times weekly for several years.

Undergoing analysis is a central, learn-by-doing part of Jungian training, which usually takes about five years and also involves taking courses in folklore, mythology, comparative religion and psychopathology, among others. It is, Martin says, very much a “mentor-based discipline.” He is fond of pointing out his own conferred pedigree, because Frey-Rohn was herself analyzed by C. G. Jung. Most analysts seem to know their bloodlines. That morning, Martin and I were passing a cafe when he spotted another American analyst, someone he knew in school and who has since settled in Switzerland. “Oh, there’s Bob,” Martin said merrily, making his way toward the man. “Bob trained with Liliane,” he explained to me, “and that makes us kind of like brothers.”

Jungian analysis revolves largely around writing down your dreams (or drawing them) and bringing them to the analyst — someone who is patently good with both symbols and people — to be scoured for personal and archetypal meaning. Borrowing from Jung’s own experiences, analysts often encourage clients to experiment on their own with active imagination, to summon a waking dreamscape and to interact with whatever, or whoever, surfaces there. Analysis is considered to be a form of psychotherapy, and many analysts are in fact trained also as psychotherapists, but in its purist form, a Jungian analyst eschews clinical talk of diagnoses and recovery in favor of broader (and some might say fuzzier) goals of self-discovery and wholeness — a maturation process Jung himself referred to as “individuation.” Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people in midlife. “The purpose of analysis is not treatment,” Martin explained to me. “That’s the purpose of psychotherapy. The purpose of analysis,” he added, a touch grandly, “is to give life back to someone who’s lost it.”

Later that day, we went to the photo studio where the work on the book was already under way. The room was a charmless space with concrete floors and black walls. Its hushed atmosphere and glaring lights added a slightly surgical aspect. There was the editor from Norton in a tweedy sport coat. There was an art director hired by Norton and two technicians from a company called DigitalFusion, who had flown to Zurich from Southern California with what looked to be a half-ton of computer and camera equipment.

Shamdasani arrived ahead of us. And so did Ulrich Hoerni, who, along with his cousin Peter Jung, had become a cautious supporter of Shamdasani, working to build consensus inside the family to allow the book out into the world. Hoerni was the one to fetch the book from the bank and was now standing by, his brow furrowed, appearing somewhat tortured. To talk to Jung’s heirs is to understand that nearly four decades after his death, they continue to reel inside the psychic tornado Jung created during his lifetime, caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics and between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency to judge and rejudge its own playmakers. Hoerni would later tell me that Shamdasani’s discovery of the stray copies of the Red Book surprised him, that even today he’s not entirely clear about whether Carl Jung ever intended for the Red Book to be published. “He left it an open question,” he said. “One might think he would have taken some of his children aside and said, ‘This is what it is and what I want done with it,’ but he didn’t.” It was a burden Hoerni seemed to wear heavily. He had shown up at the photo studio not just with the Red Book in its special padded suitcase but also with a bedroll and a toothbrush, since after the day’s work was wrapped, he would be spending the night curled up near the book — “a necessary insurance measure,” he would explain.

And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given the number of words on the page, created the impression of something written feverishly, cathartically. Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.

The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed frozen in a kind of awe, especially Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not, he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled.

ONE AFTERNOON I took a break from the scanning and visited Andreas Jung, who lives with his wife, Vreni, in C. G. Jung’s old house at 228 Seestrasse in the town of Küsnacht. The house — a 5,000-square-foot, 1908 baroque-style home, designed by the psychiatrist and financed largely with his wife, Emma’s, inheritance — sits on an expanse between the road and the lake. Two rows of trimmed, towering topiary trees create a narrow passage to the entrance. The house faces the white-capped lake, a set of manicured gardens and, in one corner, an anomalous, unruly patch of bamboo.

Andreas is a tall man with a quiet demeanor and a gentlemanly way of dressing. At 64, he resembles a thinner, milder version of his famous grandfather, whom he refers to as “C. G.” Among Jung’s five children (all but one are dead) and 19 grandchildren (all but five are still living), he is one of the youngest and also known as the most accommodating to curious outsiders. It is an uneasy kind of celebrity. He and Vreni make tea and politely serve cookies and dispense little anecdotes about Jung to those courteous enough to make an advance appointment. “People want to talk to me and sometimes even touch me,” Andreas told me, seeming both amused and a little sheepish. “But it is not at all because of me, of course. It is because of my grandfather.” He mentioned that the gardeners who trim the trees are often perplexed when they encounter strangers — usually foreigners — snapping pictures of the house. “In Switzerland, C. G. Jung is not thought to be so important,” he said. “They don’t see the point of it.”

Jung, who was born in the mountain village of Kesswil, was a lifelong outsider in Zurich, even as in his adult years he seeded the city with his followers and became — along with Paul Klee and Karl Barth — one of the best-known Swissmen of his era. Perhaps his marginalization stemmed in part from the offbeat nature of his ideas. (He was mocked, for example, for publishing a book in the late 1950s that examined the psychological phenomenon of flying saucers.) Maybe it was his well-documented abrasiveness toward people he found uninteresting. Or maybe it was connected to the fact that he broke with the established ranks of his profession. (During the troubled period when he began writing the Red Book, Jung resigned from his position at Burghölzli, never to return.) Most likely, too, it had something to do with the unconventional, unhidden, 40-something-year affair he conducted with a shy but intellectually forbidding woman named Toni Wolff, one of Jung’s former analysands who went on to become an analyst as well as Jung’s close professional collaborator and a frequent, if not fully welcome, fixture at the Jung family dinner table.

“The life of C. G. Jung was not easy,” Andreas said. “For the family, it was not easy at all.” As a young man, Andreas had sometimes gone and found his grandfather’s Red Book in the cupboard and paged through it, just for fun. Knowing its author personally, he said, “It was not strange to me at all.”

For the family, C. G. Jung became more of a puzzle after his death, having left behind a large amount of unpublished work and an audience eager to get its hands on it. “There were big fights,” Andreas told me when I visited him again this summer. Andreas, who was 19 when his grandfather died, recalled family debates over whether or not to allow some of Jung’s private letters to be published. When the extended family gathered for the annual Christmas party in Küsnacht, Jung’s children would disappear into a room and have heated discussions about what to do with what he had left behind while his grandchildren played in another room. “My cousins and brothers and I, we thought they were silly to argue over these things,” Andreas said, with a light laugh. “But later when our parents died, we found ourselves having those same arguments.”

Even Jung’s great-grandchildren felt his presence. “He was omnipresent,” Daniel Baumann, whose grandmother was Jung’s daughter Gret, would tell me when I met him later. He described his own childhood with a mix of bitterness and sympathy directed at the older generations. “It was, ‘Jung said this,’ and ‘Jung did that,’ and ‘Jung thought that.’ When you did something, he was always present somehow. He just continued to live on. He was with us. He is still with us,” Baumann said. Baumann is an architect and also the president of the board of the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht. He deals with Jungians all the time, and for them, he said, it was the same. Jung was both there and not there. “It’s sort of like a hologram,” he said. “Everyone projects something in the space, and Jung begins to be a real person again.”

ONE NIGHT DURING the week of the scanning in Zurich, I had a big dream. A big dream, the Jungians tell me, is a departure from all your regular dreams, which in my case meant this dream was not about falling off a cliff or missing an exam. This dream was about an elephant — a dead elephant with its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a suburban-style barbecue, and I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled around with cocktails; the head sizzled over the flames. I was angry at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher because she was supposed to be grilling the elephant head at the barbecue, but she hadn’t bothered to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke up.

At the hotel breakfast buffet, I bumped into Stephen Martin and a Californian analyst named Nancy Furlotti, who is the vice president on the board of the Philemon Foundation and was at that moment having tea and muesli.

“How are you?” Martin said.

“Did you dream?” Furlotti asked

“What do elephants mean to you?” Martin asked after I relayed my dream.

“I like elephants,” I said. “I admire elephants.”

“There’s Ganesha,” Furlotti said, more to Martin than to me. “Ganesha is an Indian god of wisdom.”

“Elephants are maternal,” Martin offered, “very caring.”

They spent a few minutes puzzling over the archetypal role of the kindergarten teacher. “How do you feel about her?” “Would you say she is more like a mother figure or more like a witch?”

Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a complex quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes time. The process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always immediately evident. In the following months, I told my dream to several more analysts, and each one circled around similar symbolic concepts about femininity and wisdom. One day I was in the office of Murray Stein, an American analyst who lives in Switzerland and serves as the president of the International School of Analytical Psychology, talking about the Red Book. Stein was telling me about how some Jungian analysts he knew were worried about the publication — worried specifically that it was a private document and would be apprehended as the work of a crazy person, which then reminded me of my crazy dream. I related it to him, saying that the very thought of eating an elephant’s head struck me as grotesque and embarrassing and possibly a sign there was something deeply wrong with my psyche. Stein assured me that eating is a symbol for integration. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s horrifying on a naturalistic level, but symbolically it is good.”

It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at a crossroads?)

Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are you? Did you dream last night?”

“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I dreamed the book was on fire.”

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”

The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky, like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find the right audience.

Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both Jung’s fans and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that Shamdasani finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what people will be saying about it just months after it is published. As far as he is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”

After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it will move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of Jung’s descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the Rubin Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the book would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out they were potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of the struggles of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book, he said, “the question would again have to be asked, ‘What do we do with it?’ ”

Stephen Martin too will be on hand for the book’s arrival in New York. He is already sensing that it will shed positive light on Jung — this thanks to a dream he had recently about an “inexpressively sublime” dawn breaking over the Swiss Alps — even as others are not so certain.

In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into “a fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.

Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”

The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well.”

Mentally ill and elderly people held in squalid chicken coops, authorities say

2009-09-05T16:37:00.001-07:00

Mentally ill and elderly people held in squalid chicken coops, authorities say

San Bernardino authorities arrested a woman Friday who they say boarded 22 mentally ill, elderly and other people in prison-like conditions, housing some in converted chicken coops behind razor wire fences.

Pensri Sophar Dalton, 61, was arrested on 16 counts of suspected elder abuse, according to City Atty. James F. Penman. Some of the people appeared to have mental health issues, he said.

“The stench was pretty horrific,” Penman said. “These were very squalid conditions.”

The people were being held in dilapidated buildings, some without running water or toilets. The facility is not licensed with the state or the city, Penman said. Two milk box crates containing prescription medicines were found at the site. At least two of the residents were in wheelchairs.

Police arrested Dalton after going to her home in the 2800 block of North Golden Avenue to arrest a man with outstanding warrants for drunk driving, according Penman said.

Penman said that while some residents were held in converted chicken coops, others lived in shared bedrooms, the doors of which had padlocks on them. Residents ate on two picnic tables beneath a metal roof outside on a dirt floor.

There is no "real" psychology

2009-08-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

By William Todd Schultz
May 29 2009

A recent post on "real psychology"--as opposed to all the fake or unreal psychology out there--got me thinking. The day we all decide on what real psychology is, is the day psychology dies. Real psychology equals dead-ended, myopic, oversimplification--of subject matter and of methodology. Real psychology is a means-centered approach. That is to say: only psychologists making use of prescribed, narrowly-defined "scientistic" methods are allowed into the fold. All others are touchy-feely, hopelessly subjective trespassers. Such a stance is 1) naïve, 2) unhistorical, and 3) regressive.

The study of the mind goes way back, of course, but let's just look at the 20th century. We had Wundt and his "experimental introspection," research into things like reaction time. We had the wonderfully overreaching brilliance of William James, who was into the same things as Wundt--attention, memory, sensation--but also psychic phenomena, religious experience, and philosophy and art. We had Freud and psychoanalysis. We had Jung and his association experiments. Then there was the biologically reductionistic doings of psychiatry that led, by the 1950s, to seizure therapies and lobotomy. Skinner's radical behaviorism had its day, followed by the cognitive revolution and, in time, by neuroscience. Lots always going on, in other words, from lots of different angles. Methodologically speaking, there was case study, experimentation, introspection, animal behavior, surveys, projective techniques, dream analysis, phenomenology, lesion studies--the list goes on and on. Methodological pluralism was/is the norm. But still today, let's face it, psychology is more or less in the Stone Ages. No doubt much has been accomplished. Powerful mid-level theories do exist that are promisingly predictive. But as for the great big questions, those enduring mysteries, we've taken only very small steps. We still don't know why we dream. We still don't know what causes schizophrenia. We still can't make solid sense of the function of consciousness. So let's not start proclaiming what real psychology is. Better to keep that question helpfully unanswered.

Psychology's disorder now is multiple personality, and in a way that's fine. What we've got is something like 60 sub-disciplines leaving in their wake a farrago of sub sub-disciplines. Each sub-discipline is pretty insular, there is little harmony overall (far more cacophony), and what's especially funny is this: every sub-discipline tends to believe--according to an in-group, out-group dynamic--that it is THE ONLY ONE DOING REAL PSYCHOLOGY. In fact, each is focusing on its own little hiccup of mind, its own pet variables, while mainly neglecting the questions other sub-disciplines find so essential. So each sub-discipline inflates the importance of its methods/questions while devaluing the methods/questions of other sub-disciplines. That attitude was on hair-raising display in the post cited at the top of this one.

Take my situation. I have a PhD in Personality from UC Davis. Now, presently, with some important exceptions, Social Psychologists sometimes devalue Personality Science while Personality Psychologists sometimes devalue Social Psychology. I like to think of this as the narcissism of minor differences, but that's another subject altogether.

I also do qualitative case study research that in my case goes by the name of Psychobiography. According to some, that's not real psychology because it is not experimental. Well, someone should have clued in Piaget, Erikson, Maslow, Freud, Jung, James, Skinner (who also used single-subject design), RD Laing, Henry Murray, Silvan Tomkins, etc etc etc, ALL OF WHOM DID CASE STUDY AND ALL OF WHOM ARE REGARDED AS SEMINAL FIGURES IN THE FIELD. I don't know, it's a strangely territorial neurotic mind-set that 1) believes itself in possession of true knowledge and 2) feels a need to tell lowly others that what they are up to is BS.

I say this: we psychologists know a lot less than we think we do, and at this very early stage of the game in the study of mind, all promising approaches and questions are welcome. The more the merrier. Does anything go? No. But is there one real psychology? Double no.

Published on Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com)

Artistic tendencies linked to 'schizophrenia gene'

2009-08-14T22:48:00.000-07:00

Salvador Dali's mental disorders were also the key to his creativity.

We're all familiar with the stereotype of the tortured artist. Salvador Dali's various disorders and Sylvia Plath's depression spring to mind. Now new research seems to show why: a genetic mutation linked to psychosis and schizophrenia also influences creativity.

The finding could help to explain why mutations that increase a person's risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome have been preserved, even preferred, during human evolution, says Szabolcs Kéri, a researcher at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, who carried out the study.

Kéri examined a gene involved in brain development called neuregulin 1, which previous studies have linked to a slightly increased risk of schizophrenia. Moreover, a single DNA letter mutation that affects how much of the neuregulin 1 protein is made in the brain has been linked to psychosis, poor memory and sensitivity to criticism.

About 50 per cent of healthy Europeans have one copy of this mutation, while 15 per cent possess two copies.
Creative thinking

To determine how these variations affect creativity, Kéri genotyped 200 adults who responded to adverts seeking creative and accomplished volunteers. He also gave the volunteers two tests of creative thinking, and devised an objective score of their creative achievements, such as filing a patent or writing a book.

People with two copies of the neuregulin 1 mutation – about 12 per cent of the study participants – tended to score notably higher on these measures of creativity, compared with other volunteers with one or no copy of the mutation. Those with one copy were also judged to be more creative, on average, than volunteers without the mutation. All told, the mutation explained between 3 and 8 per cent of the differences in creativity, Kéri says.

Exactly how neuregulin 1 affects creativity isn't clear. Volunteers with two copies of the mutation were no more likely than others to possess so-called schizotypal traits, such as paranoia, odd speech patterns and inappropriate emotions. This would suggest that the mutation's connection to mental illness does not entirely explain its link to creativity, Kéri says.
Dampening the brain

Rather, Kéri speculates that the mutation dampens a brain region that reins in mood and behaviour, called the prefrontal cortex. This change could unleash creative potential in some people and psychotic delusions in others.

Intelligence could be one factor that determines whether the neuregulin 1 mutation boosts creativity or contributes to psychosis. Kéri's volunteers tended to be smarter than average. In contrast, another study of families with a history of schizophrenia found that the same mutation was associated with lower intelligence and psychotic symptoms.

"My clinical experience is that high-IQ people with psychosis have more intellectual capacity to deal with psychotic experiences," Kéri says. "It's not enough to experience those feelings, you have to communicate them."
Intelligence's influence

Jeremy Hall, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK who uncovered the link between the neuregulin 1 mutation and psychosis, agrees that the gene's effects are probably influenced by cognitive factors such as intelligence.

This doesn't mean that psychosis and creativity are the same, though. "There's always been this slightly romantic idea that madness and genius are the flipside to the same coin. How much is that true? Madness is often madness and doesn't have as much genetic association with intelligence," Hall says.

Bernard Crespi, a behavioural geneticist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is holding his applause for now. "This is a very interesting study with remarkably strong results, though it must be replicated in an independent population before the results can be accepted with confidence," he says.

http://current.com/items/90359691_art-for-u.htm

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17474-artistic-tendencies-linked-to-schizophrenia-gene.html