Synaesthesia in Chinese
OK, first of the series of Synaesthesia Conference lectures that I’ll be writing up. Today, I’ll be talking about a four year study conducted by Julia Simner (of University of Edinburgh) and her team. In their study, Simner and her colleagues looked at grapheme-colour synaesthesia, comparing the experiences of English synaesthetes (which are hugely studied) to the experiences of Chinese synaesthetes (who are barely studied at all). 
Where to start? Some general factoids about grapheme-colour synaesthesia. About 1% of the population are estimated to have it. This phenomena is where letters and numbers illicit a colour experience in the synaesthete. These experiences follow non-random rules – the same letters seem to always illicit the same colour experience, like “A” always being green, for example.
As for words, many synaesthetes find that whole words are coloured as a whole, rather than each individual letter being coloured. The way words are coloured seems to vary in three main ways:
- Some synaesthetes simply see each letter coloured individually (as per their own internal consistencies) – for example, “CAT” would be seen as BLUE-GREEN-RED (or whatever)
- Some synaesthetes find words are coloured by their initial letter – e.g. “CAT” would be BLUE, as “C” is blue for them
- Some synaesthetes have their words coloured by their initial vowel – again, “CAT” would be GREEN, as the initial vowel is usually green
There are two main theories as to what influences the colours of different letters and words. One is the semantic influence – this is where the unconscious meaning pinned to words and therefore letters determines what colour the letters will be. For example, we might associate “D” with dogs (A is for apple, B is for bird… I’m sure you were taught the alphabet in a similar fashion). Well, dogs are brown (usually), so maybe this is why some synaesthetes experience D as being brown.
The other theory is the frequency effect – more common letters are more common colours. For example, A is often red or green, whereas X is often something exotic like purple or gold. This isn’t too much of a surprise, either.
Hmm, what next…? Maybe a bit of info about Chinese languages (assume we’re talking about Mandarin throughout, but the rules probably cross over to Cantonese). Bear with me – my knowledge of Chinese is not great.
Chinese languages are ideographic (well, almost. We won’t get into that argument here) - they don’t have alphabets, so no letter units. They consist of word unit characters. There are two phonetic spelling systems (Pinyin and Bopomo), which Chinese children may be taught, in order to help them to speak the language before learning to write the script (which is intensely complicated). Pinyin uses a combination of Westernised spellings (for pronunciation) and a number (that indicates tone – Chinese languages are tonal, which means, depending how you say a word, it can have multiple meanings. Phew.)
Simner and her team wondered if this Pinyin system could function in a similar way to English in terms of its effects on synaesthetes – does the initial “letter” (or sound) or vowel sound effect the overall consistency in colour experience?
Well, yes and no. Their study showed that if native Chinese speakers were given the Pinyin phonetic spelling of a word character, they would experience the colours in a consistent manner similar to English synaesthetes – words beginning with a “y” sound would all be green, etc. etc. However, if they were given just traditional Chinese characters to look at (with no Pinyin) these consistencies did not carry over. Hmm. Back to square one.
Chinese script itself is made up of morphemes called “radicals”. Each character contains a semantic radical (which conveys meaning) and a phonetic radical (which tells you how the word should be pronounced). These radicals can be on either side of the character, and again, location affects meaning (I think you’re beginning to understand why Chinese script is so hard to learn…)
So, does the semantic or phonetic radical colour the character overall? Or do neither of them do this?
Simner and her colleagues found three variables – hue, saturation and brightness of colour experience. It seems that Chinese synaesthetes have a more subtle colour experience than Western synaesthetes – the radical on the left accounts for the hue, the semantic radical accounts for saturation, and the radical on the right for brightness. Weird.
The frequency effect occurs in Chinese, too – common characters (and radicals) are more common colours.
And that… is about all that I can compute. If you want to know more, please head on over to Julia Simner‘s profile page on Edinburgh Uni’s website, and feel free to send her your questions! 
UKSA 2011 Conference: Overview
Yesterday saw the first day of the annual UK Synaesthesia Association‘s conference, this year hosted by UEL. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend today’s half of the conference (and my Sunday didn’t go to plan anyway, but that’s another story). However, I intend to give you a taster of what I experienced yesterday.
As a foreword: I won’t go into the details of the various talks here. I intend to write up the main ideas of my favourite talks over the next few days, so look out for those. This post is more intended to impart a general overview of the atmosphere of the conference.
Well, to start with: synaesthesia. I’ve done a brief overview of this fascinating neurological anomaly before, but just as a refresher:
Synaesthesia is estimated to affect about 2% of the population. It comes in many different forms, all of them mind bloggling. Synaesthetes have a notoriously hard time explaining or describing their experience of the world to others. And yet, despite all this, there is very limited research done into synaesthesia.
Maybe, simply, because it’s not a problem. It’s really, really interesting, but it needs no cure. In fact, I have had many synaesthetes say to me that they can’t imagine living without it.
Synaesthesia is a crossing of the senses. The most commonly known types are grapheme-colour synaesthesia and sound-colour synaesthesia. To explain: grapheme colour synaesthesia is usually where an individual will experience a certain colour whenever they see a certain colour, letter or word. Read more about it here.
The UKSA conference gave the opportunity for people with an interest in synaesthesia (many of them synaesthetes themselves) to discuss research and network. Throughout the day, poster presentations (summarising studies) were on display in a downstairs room at UEL (pictured above), and a series of talks were given throughout the day. The talks I attended ranged from the very “sciencey” to the more phenomenological discussion of synaesthesia in art.
I can’t speak for others, but I think synaesthesia draws me because it is a wonderfully romantic idea – some unique individuals can see music in colour, taste colour, experience sounds as textured. This is beyond metaphor: this is a very real experience. And it’s not trained association: it’s very much automatic, internally consistent and unconsciously processed.
As always, if you reading this and it sounds familiar, please let me know – I’d love to hear about your own experiences.
Synaesthesia as a window into human nature
Yesterday, the University of East London had the pleasure of welcoming Ed Hubbard from Vanderbilt University, USA to give a talk about synaesthesia. It was a free public lecture, lasting about 90 minutes, and we had a pretty great turn out.
The lecture signalled the start of the annual UK Synaesthesia Association conference (this year hosted by UEL) – whilst the conference is still open to the public, they need to be paying public, so this free lecture was a bit more accessible to armchair psychologists.
Here’s the blurb from the talk:
What do David Hockney, Richard Feynman, Nabokov, Messiaen and Stevie Wonder all have in common? They all experience synaesthesia, a “union of the senses”.
For some synaesthetes, listening to a piece of music may also cause them to see specific colours while for others letters or numbers are always tinged a certain colour. Although synaesthesia has been known about for over 100 years, interest in synaesthesia has undergone resurgence in the past decade. This talk will discuss recent research, showing what synaesthetes already know: synaesthesia is real, and synaesthetes are neither telling stories, nor are they “crazy.”
More information about synaesthesia can be found here: www.uel.ac.uk/psychology/research/synaesthesia
I really enjoyed Ed’s talk – he’s a great speaker, and was very obviously passionate about his area of research. He’s also keen to get all you American synaesthetes involved with his research, so please don’t hesitate to get in contact with him: edhubbard [at] gmail [dot] com
More about synaesthesia to follow tomorrow, as I am, at this moment in time, at the conference. Need to rush off now – lectures to attend. Exciting stuff!
Books: The Red Queen
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
Following on from yesterday’s review of Sexual Nature at the Natural History Museum, I thought I’d give you a “recommended read”. I actually finished this book about a month ago, but am only just now getting around to reviewing it. Don’t expect any ground-breaking reflection – I’m a bit weary at the moment.
Well, the long and short of it is: Matt Ridley is great. I’ve known this since I read his “Nature Via Nurture” last year, at which point my dad recommended this.
Here, Ridley looks at the question of: why sex? Sex uses a lot of energy, is slow, and requires two individuals. And it leads to a lot of dangerous competition. Well, sex has its various advantages, and Ridley looks at these systematically.
But the more entertaining portion of the book looks at various sexual behaviours: from sexy-son theory, to the thousands of genders in the mushroom family, you’re bound to be in for a few surprises.
My main love of Ridley comes from his rare ability to impart brilliant scientific knowledge, whilst still keeping it all fascinating and entertaining (I would NEVER describe Ridley as “dry”). Phrases like “a gigantic experiment called communism in a laboratory called Russia…” are bound to raise a smirk. And you will be bowled over by the blunt illustration of the interconnectedness of all human-beings (as early on as p. 12). Be amused by the Coolidge effect! Finally understand why gentlemen prefer blondes (or not)!
Definitely worth a look in – I enjoyed it very much, and imagine I will be reading it again in the not-too-distant future.
Contains Themes Of A Sexual Nature
Hoho. Gotcha. No porno here.
Actually, I’m talking about the new temporary exhibition at the Natural History Museum, entitled “Sexual Nature“, which opened recently.
As I said in my post yesterday, I went to visit the NHM with my friend Vin last Thursday, with the express intention of seeing this temporary exhibition (and going the gift shop, ofc.)
I’ve read mixed reviews of “Sexual Nature”, so wasn’t sure what to expect, but at only £4 for students, it’s not really money wasted, regardless.
Image from NHM website
I have to say, I was really pleasantly surprised by the exhibition – if a little weirded out, too.
You see, when you pass through the big, frosted glass doors behind the ticket desk, it feels a bit like you’ve just walked into a seedy sex shop: there are long curtains to walk around, and what I can only describe as “mood music” softly playing in the background. But do not be alarmed: behind the curtains awaits a wonderland of facts and figures, with slightly unnerving multimedia support. First up is the giant video screen showing chimps fornicating (and my lord, some of them look bored), which you can’t fail to notice as you walk in.
All around you are display cabinets with bizarre artefacts: penis bones, insects “caught in the act”, and even a pair of unfortunate locked foxes (if you don’t know what I mean by this, please go and look it up).
I think the strength of the exhibition lies in its variety: there are a multitude of of different ways the information is displayed, from the written boards (which are very readable), to the pictures, videos, display cabinets and even the slightly disturbing “Green Porno” – the image of Isabella Rosellini dressed as a snail will stay with me always (for good or for ill).
I don’t want to say much more, as it’ll spoil the surprises in store. In conclusion: I loved it. £4 well spent.
Sexual Nature is on display from now until 2nd October.
Open 10.00-17.50 daily, last admission 17.15.
Adult £8, Child and concessions £4, Family £21
Free to Members, Patrons and children aged 3 and under.
This exhibition contains frank information and imagery about sex.
Brain Awareness Day 2011 – the poster is here!
Ooh, look, shiny official Brain Awareness Day poster!
Brain Awareness Day 2011
As part of International Brain Awareness Week (14-20th March 2011), my supervisor Dr Ashok Jansari will be hosting a Brain Awareness Day at the School of Psychology at our UEL Stratford campus. My part in all this is quite exciting – I get to be his personal assistant in the proceedings. Which means I am figuratively representing the event online!
Well, what’s involved? The event will start with a public lecture entitled ‘The Life of Brian (the Brain)’, giving a tour of the history of our understanding of the brain. This will begin with the first written documentation of the word ‘brain’ in a 3000 year old Egyptian papyrus and move towards how modern neuropsychologists are beginning to unravel the mysteries of an organ that is more complex than the most advanced computer known to man. By using examples from his own work, Dr Jansari will demonstrate how we can understand the devastating consequences of some forms of brain damage but also about the preserved abilities following trauma.
This information can then be used to help understand how the healthy brain functions and then this information can be used to develop rehabilitation to help the lives of the patients. For example, David cannot recognise any faces (including his wife’s), but can tell you what whether someone is happy or sad and whose vision is good enough to look at a football shirt and tell you which premiership team it belongs to. Then there is Nicola, who is so profoundly amnesic that she makes the hero of the classic film Memento look like he has a good memory! However, by capitalising on unconscious forms of memory, Dr Jansari’s team taught Nicola to use a complex Palm Top electronic device to remember to take her medication – despite this remarkable learning, each time she saw the Palm Top, she claimed never to have used it before.
After the public lecture, there will be a reception between 7 and 8pm with information displays by organisations that work with individuals with brain-related issues (e.g. Headway and the Encephalitis Society), posters about research at the School of Psychology and even models of the brain that the audience can take apart. The evening will conclude with Dr Jansari chairing a panel discussion about ‘living with brain damage’ where two of his research patients will discuss both what it means to live with this terrible life-changing event but also that it certainly is not the end of the world…..
Dr Jansari’s Brain Awareness Day’s have been really popular in the past – you don’t need to be an academic to get something out of this. If you are simply just interested in brains and what they do (and who wouldn’t be?!) then come to Stratford and enjoy an evening of exploration.
If you fancy coming along, it’s FREE and open to all – Wednesday 16th of March, 6-9pm, at UEL’s Stratford Campus
You can also find Brain Awareness Day listed on the Dana Foundation’s website.
My little soldier
Well, yesterday was stressful. For the first time in my life, I had to take full responsibility for the life of another living creature.
My darling little rat, Bubble, developed a mammary tumour last week (very suddenly appeared – I was alarmed that an acorn-sized bump appeared on her belly practically overnight). Naturally, I was massively worried and upset – rats only live for 2-3 years, and at 14 months, Bubble is too young to go yet. But we couldn’t let her live with this – it was clearly draining her bodily resources, and in time it would likely increase in size, affect her mobility and ultimately her quality of life.
So, on Tuesday afternoon last week, it was off to the vet (for the first time in a whole year – I have healthy little babies usually!)
Well, the vet confirmed my dreaded suspicions – and then drilled it home that an operation had 50/50 chances of survival. And in rats, tumours are often malignant, so now she’s had one, she’ll likely have more later on in life.
But that’s not my concern at the moment. My concern is the fact that she had a very trying day yesterday (I dropped her off at 9am, and only got to pick her up at 4:30pm), but she is now on the mend.
She was very quiet when I got her home – very unusual for her. She spent the majority of the evening in either my or Ben’s jumper, feeling a bit sorry for herself. But she is behaving a bit more like her usual self this morning!!
Yay for Bubble – my little soldier.
Books: Phantoms in the Brain
Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind
Wow. I honestly don’t want to say too much, because I really think you should go and read this book yourself. All of the reader reviews are right: it’s fascinating, it’s educational and most importantly, it is very very readable.
I’ve seen Ramachandran talk live (at the Royal Institution) and the enthusiasm and showmanship that he presented then really comes through in this book.
I actually got two copies for Christmas – one from Ben and one from my dad. Confusion over Amazon wishlists – Ben obviously doesn’t know how to use them! Bless him. So rather than send the book back, we gave one copy right back to my dad (as he is all about consciousness, phenomenology, and the mystery of the mind).
Now, it took me three weeks to read this. It took my dad one flight back to Dubai. He reads insanely fast! But he says he couldn’t put it down. He’s a very brain-modular sort of person, and his favourite chapters were towards the end, when Ramachandran discusses qualia, and the source and purpose of consciousness.
Personally, I’m all about the earlier chapters, when Ramachandran looks at a variety of different neurological phenomena. He presents us with a variety of case studies, each with very particular forms of brain damage, leading to very unusual problems. There are his famous “phantom limb” patients – people who, following an amputation, can still feel sensation in their absent limb. Later, he returns to the subject of phantoms, by discussing the mindboggling (but increasingly rare) phenomenon of pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy.
But I don’t want to discuss this book at length – I feel it would detract from your own experience when reading it.
If you like Oliver Sacks, you will love this. If you like “unusualness” and maybe even mystery stories, this is for you. Go get it. There are even some optical illusions you can play with (just don’t do them on the train – you’ll look like an idiot).
Don’t fancy reading? Ramachandran has also presented his cases in a two-part BBC4 documentary.
Catch of the Day
I’m on a pescetarian diet. Yes, you heard that right.
For those of you who have never heard of it, pescetarianism is what it says on the tin: a diet that revolves around fish. Etymologically, the word is the bastard child of the Italian “pesce” meaning fish, and the more commonly used “vegetarian” (or anything-ian to be perfectly honest). It means that, whilst I cannot cut out the flesh of all beasts from my diet, I can just about narrow it down to sea-dwelling beasties (watch out, whales and seals).
I’ve not gone down this route for ethical reasons (I’m not sure how that’s possible, anyway – killing is killing), but for health reasons. I’m sure it hasn’t passed your notice by now that I am some extreme glutton, and one of my first loves is red meat. But red meat is fatty, gloopy stuff – cut out the meat in your diet and notice a massive drop in calories, fat and all sorts of nastiness. Also, see a massive relief for your wallet, as I discovered today whilst doing my weekly grocery shop.
But fish is a different beast – all that swimming around must keep them in awfully good shape, because they are a very lean source of protein. Plus (extra bonus!) they are a fantastic source of a massive variety of vitamins and minerals. Oh, and those omega 3 thingies that you’ve been hearing (herring?) so much about. Well, some more than others, but we’ll get to that later.
I don’t eat enough fish usually anyway. It doesn’t help that Ben hates the stuff (so I never bother to buy or cook it), but incorporating fish into your diet is a tricky business. At this point, you might be shouting “no it isn’t – buy fish, eat fish!!”. You might think I’m a bit simple. But no – reading some articles online have made the whole business n-times more complicated.
Firstly – which fish? We’ve each got our favourites (and breaded&deep fried is off limits for the purpose of this exercise. It’s a diet, after all). Personally, I love salmon, but unfortunately, that’s one of the more expensive supermarket options. But there is a massive selection of different fishes widely available, and each is good for different reasons.
Broadly, fish can be separated into two main categories: oily, and white. Oily fish are those that contain the large amounts of omega-3 that everyone keeps telling us we need more of: this includes salmon, mackerel, herring (including kippers!), sardines, anchovies, trout and fresh tuna. You’ll notice that I’ve specified FRESH tuna, and that’s because (according to the Food Standards Agency), the process of canning tuna reduces its naturally occurring oil levels down to that of white fish.So, as well as tinned tuna, the white fishes include: haddock, cod, plaice, coley, pollock and Dover sole. Obviously, neither of these list is anywhere near complete, but those are just some of the more well known fish right there.
So far so good. White fish is lower in calories, but oily fish has essential fats. BUT WAIT. You can’t just toddle off and eat whatever fish you fancy every day of the week. Oh no. Oily fish contains low levels of pollutants (including dioxins and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls)) – they have no immediate effect on health (don’t panic) but they can build up in the body over time. For that reason, it’s recommended you limit your intake of oily fish. But to how much? It depends on who you are. Most women should limit their weekly intake to two portions of oily fish, whilst men (and women who don’t plan on having kids) can have up to four portions a week.
And it gets worse! Crab, sea bream, sea bass, turbot, halibut and rock salmon have also been found to have similar levels of pollutants to oily fish, so you better keep an eye on them too.
And keep an eye on swordfish and shark (who really eats shark?) too – they have unusually high levels of mercury in them. Limit your intake of these bad boys to just once a week.
But it’s not all doom and gloom – don’t be frightened away from seafood altogether, as the benefits well outweigh the costs. You just need to be careful, and mix it up a bit – a wider variety of fish (and seafood! prawns, crab, etc. all good for you too) is good for you AND lessens the environmental impact, too (if that’s your bag).
So, the long and short of it is: fish is good. Fin. (ahha)
Books: The 2010 Round-up
Well, at the start of 2010, I resolved to read more. And I think I’ve done pretty damn well. Here, as we stand at the edge of the abyss, and the last dregs of 2010 filter away, I can happily say that I have read quite a few books this year.
It’s been tricky, too: throwing myself into a scientific discipline at the last minute (shut up, physicists: psychology so is a science. It has ology and everything) meant that I faced a lot of academic reading, in the form of text books and journal articles. But in between all of that, I have managed a grand total of 39 books this year – 23 non-fiction, and 16 fiction (where I’ve listed text books, that’s where I have actually read them, cover to cover). And this is what they were:
- 30.01.10 – Nicky Hayes – A First Course in Psychology (nf)
- 09.02.10 – Matt Ridley – Nature Via Nurture (nf)
- 01.03.10 – James Hogg – The Three Perils of Man (f)
- 07.03.10 – Adam Phillips – Monogamy (nf)
- 22.03.10 – John Marzillier & John Hall – What is clinical psychology? (nf)
- 24.03.10 – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World (f)
- 30.03.10 – Terry Pratchett – Nation (f)
- 22.04.10 – Walter J. Freeman – How Brains Make Up Their Minds (nf)
- 15.05.10 – G. K. Chesterton – Father Brown Stories (f)
- 19.05.10 – Russell L. Ackoff, Herbert J. Addison & Sally Bibb – Management f-Laws (nf)
- 20.05.10 – Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (f)
- 26.05.10 – Siri Hustvedt – The Shaking Woman or A History Of My Nerves (nf)
- 29.05.10 – Terry Pratchett – Thud! (f)
- 02.06.10 – Oliver Sacks – The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (nf)
- 23.06.10 – Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White (f)
- 29.06.10 – Joseph Conrad – Heart Of Darkness (f)
- 02.07.10 – David Hume – On Suicide (nf)
- 05.07.10 – *Iain Banks – Complicity (f)
- 22.07.10 – Jonathan Weiner – Time, Love, Memory (nf)
- 26.07.10 – Christopher Fowler – Spanky (f)
- 14.08.10 – Robert Winston – Human Instinct (nf)
- 22.08.10 – Iain M. Banks – Consider Phlebas (f)
- 28.08.10 – American Psychological Association – Concise Rules of APA Style (nf)
- 08.09.10 – Andy Field & Graham Hole – How to Design and Report Experiments (nf)
- 13.09.10 – Nick Braisby (ed.) – Cognitive Psychology: A Methods Companion (nf)
- 20.09.10 – Ken Kesey – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (f)
- 07.10.10 – Steven Pinker – The Language Instinct (nf)
- 12.10.10 – *Paul Broks – Into The Silent Land (nf)
- 21.10.10 – Daniel Levitin – This Is Your Brain On Music (nf)
- 31.10.10 – Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia (nf)
- 07.11.10 – The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (f)
- 10.11.10 – Alain de Botton – Status Anxiety (nf)
- 11.11.10 – Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (f)
- 14.11.10 – Richard P. Feynman – The Meaning of it All (nf)
- 29.11.10 – *Andrew Solomon – The Noonday Demon (nf)
- 04.12.10 – Iain Banks – The Bridge (f)
- 26.12.10 – Axel Scheffler – How to Keep a Pet Squirrel (f)
- 27.12.10 – Dr Liz Miller – Mood Mapping (nf)
- 29.12.10 – Michael S. Gazzaniga – Nature’s Mind (nf)
And I’ve just started the first one for 2011. How about you? Did you chomp through some good reads this year? Which were your favourites? I’ve put an asterisk by my three absolute favourites this year, and massively recommend them.
Books: Mood Mapping
Mood Mapping: Plot your way to emotional health and happiness
I should probably start by saying I did not like this book. In fact, there are no significant redeeming features, in my honest opinion. So, if you have read this book, use this book or like this book for whatever reason, then please give this review a miss. Because I didn’t like it, this review will mainly concentrate on WHY I didn’t like it. These opinions, being opinions, are not debatable.
Where to start? Probably at the beginning, is best. When this book was first released, I read an interesting review of it in the Guardian. So, when I saw this book in my local BHF book shop, I thought “what the hell” and thought I’d give it a go. I have never read a self-help style book in my life, and now I know why.
Dr Liz Miller is an ex-neurosurgeon, and so you would expect her to be a sensible woman of science. She’s not: she is full of absolute crap. I was willing to sit through her sad stories of struggling through her breakdowns (she says in the text that she is bipolar, but she doesn’t specify what type. I suspect cyclothymia), and to start with, her advice is pretty sound. However, it is also common sense: keep a mood diary so that you can try and see patterns in mood vs. time of day, events, foods, etc.
Anything that didn’t fall under this header of “common sense advice” was not useful at all, and in fact made me rather angry. One of my common gripes is preachy, self-righteous types: Miller is one of these. Her favourite thing to preach about, it would seem, is food. I knew this would be a problem from the Introduction, where she gently declares a war on meat, alcohol, and processed food. Later in the book, she all but blames mood disorders solely on what we eat.
Let me get one thing straight: PROCESSED FOOD WILL NOT MAKE YOU DROP DEAD. You do not need to be on a “raw food diet” to be happy. Let’s look at the evidence: you know plenty of people who eat microwave meals, take aways and stuff from tins on an almost daily basis, and yet they are functioning perfectly. And then there is “Doctor” Gillian McKeith. I’m sure you’ve all been forwarded a copy of the McKeith vs. Nigella email (they’re both 50, and yet…) She doesn’t look like a happy bunny. She looks fucking miserable.
Fair enough, we’re all sensitive to different foods in different ways – I’m not all that susceptible to caffeine, but I am more careful about alcohol nowadays. And I think that’s the key: you do NOT have to give up everything fun or delicious to live well. You need to know your own body. And that’s where Mood Mapping MIGHT be useful: just for finding patterns in your mood in response to external stimuli. But you do NOT NEED TO BUY THIS BOOK (RRP: £12.99) to be able to do that. Food is not the root to aaaaaall your problems.
On a housekeeping note: Miller needs to get hold of a better proofreader. Even my casual, half-attentive reading of this book (often accompanied by a background of Christmas TV and the sound of family members reading articles from the newspaper outloud) spotted a whole menagerie of errors. Most hilarious IMHO was pp. 237-8, and the supposed “Causes of bipolar”…
“…Bipolar disorder can also start after head injury, treatment with anti-malarial drugs, particularly mefloquinine, head injury, childhood abuse, drug abuse…”
And later on in this ridiculous list of madness and repetition: post-traumatic stress disorder. WHAT?! PTSD is a mental illness in its own right, not a “cause” of bipolar. I think she’s getting confused: violent mood swings are not the only characteristic feature of bipolar. They are a symptom. And guess what? They just so happen to be quite a significant symptom of PTSD, too. Just because someone is having severe mood swings does not mean they have suddenly “come down with” bipolar disorder.
I’m trying to keep this short, so here’s the last and most important reason why I hate this book:
“…what my research and experience did prove is that mood and its associated chemicals respond more to the five keys to mood than they do to drugs. By physically managing your mood, it is often possible to dispense with drugs entirely.” (p. 233)
My, that’s a sweeping statement. And, “prove”? Really? Please, tell this to anyone suffering from psychosis, or chronic, major depression. Some people simply cannot function without medication. Some people can’t even cope WITH medication, it’s that bad. MY research and experience INDICATES this. Read a far better and more realistic account of mood disorder.
By all means, I am not poo-pooing Miller’s personal trauma and experience of the mental health system, but that is what it is: a personal trauma. She found something that works for her. Good. She has no right to prescribe it to others.
Books: The Noonday Demon
The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression
This book took me a long time to read. I had to put a lot of effort in to reading it. Usually, that is a sign that I am finding the book boring, or a chore. That is not true in this case: the sheer effort involved here was to overcome the deep sense of sadness held within the pages.
Andrew Solomon’s comprehensive masterpiece on depression is an incredibly painful read, especially if the experiences described are familiar to you. I’m fairly certain that everyone knows someone who has at some time suffered from clinical depression (whether mild or major), and it is still even now treated with some awkwardness, to say the least. As Solomon points out, “our society has little room in it for moping” – a common phrase thrown at depressives is “pull yourself together”. Solomon relates an incredibly provocative life event (which lead to his third breakdown) in which he dislocated his shoulder pretty badly: knowing his own body and how he reacts to prolonged physical pain (they are a large cause of his depressive episodes) he calmly asked the doctors at A&E to look up his psychiatric history in order to hurry along pain relief. He knew that without pain control, he was likely to plunge into a deep depression. Rather than listen to their patient, and be sympathetic to his suffering by offering a psychiatric consult, doctors told him: “Pull yourself together and stop feeling sorry for yourself”. He was also accused of being “uncooperative” and “childish”. Solomon later lapsed into suicidal ideation and later ended up having a minor breakdown.
Solomon bases this book around his own experiences of major depression (including three breakdowns, thousands of dollars worth of therapy and a rainbow of medications) but this is by no means a self-indulgent, autobiographical look-in. He relates stories from many cultures and classes, from people of all walks of life, all sharing a terrible common ground. Solomon shows us the world of self-help groups, animistic rituals to cure depression in Senegal (the ndeup ritual, in case you want to pursue further reading), the quiet world of Greenlandic depression and the ignored population suffering below the poverty line. All are fascinating. All are equally distressing. Much of it made me angry. All of it moved me deeply.
You know what you’re getting in to from the first page of the first chapter: Solomon tells us, truthfully, that “no matter what we do, we will in the end die”. It does not get any cheerier, even when Solomon devotes a chapter to statistics. But it is illuminating: within the first ten pages, I was already thinking that this should be essential reading for anyone working with depressives, be they psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, helpline volunteers… It explains an awful lot, and does so without fear and without apology.
Solomon mentions in the foreword that he is not a doctor or a psychologist, and this is a purely personal book, with interpretations only, and is not a substitute for appropriate treatment. However, early on, he throws away common misconceptions about depression: for example, that it is “just chemical”. Well, if you want to be accurate, EVERYTHING is “just chemical”, but that doesn’t make it any less personal or painful.
Depression isn’t intrinsically linked to suicide, but a lot of depressives do think suicidal thoughts (even if they do not enact suicidal acts). It’s incredibly sad to consider the logic behind suicide: the pain so great that you wish everything could just go away, forever. Solomon includes a beautifully poignant quote from one of my old favourites, G. K. Chesterton:
The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
But it is not all doom and gloom (hah!). Solomon also shares with us his journey towards managing his depression, as well as the stories of others, and how their lives were turned around by patience and treatment. The final chapter of the book is lovingly titled “Hope”, and Solomon ends his work beautifully, asking us to “Hold on to time; don’t wish your life away. Even the minutes when you feel you are going to explode are minutes of your life, and you will never get those minutes again”.
In his foreword, Solomon warns us that he is “not a doctor or a psychologist or even a philosopher”. I disagree with the last part, and I urge you to read this book.
Art Outdoors: Forest Hill
I used to volunteer at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill (it’s fantastic – if you haven’t been, go. It’s particularly family friendly). Sadly, I had to stop my regular volunteering there earlier this year, when I began my MSc – there are only so many hours in the day.
But I still like to keep abreast of how things are going – and it was my great pleasure to help with some research into the volunteering experience this week. It gave me a chance to catch up with some friendly faces, but unfortunately I had to rush off after the session, so didn’t get a chance to pop my head in to all the departments.
But on my way back to Forest Hill station, I saw the Horniman’s arm extending throughout the community, in the form of a commissioned street mural. I saw them starting work on it when I was last at the are (September?) but this was the first time I saw it for real. For those of you nearby, go and have a look. For faraway friends, I hope you enjoy the photos
Christmas: Science
Part two in the Quirky Christmas Gift Guide, and we’re into the lab for some science-related goodies. This is a more general overview of science (sorry if the images I’ve conjured up are a little cliché!) – I realise that last week was also sciencey, but hey, that’s what I go for
OK, so the ideal science gifts would be a high calibre microscope (if you’re me) or a high calibre telescope (if you’re Ben – does this say anything about out characters?), but that is a weeeee bit out of the old price bracket for normal people. So here are some cute, household items, with a nod to science (in a purely superficial way – sorry!)
Enjoy! And once again – if you have any ideas for a theme (or would like to produce a guest post “Quirky Gift Guide”!) then let me know.
OK, first up: thank you to my friend Louise for directing me on to this. Many of you will remember my Dinosaur and Woodland Critter cookies, so know that I have a penchant for novelty shaped food. So this is beauty in my eyes. Priced at $14.99 (about £9.50) from ThinkGeek:
Labcutter Science Cookie Cutters
Next up, I first saw these at the Science Museum, but had to resist buying them (miserly student that I am). They also do a s&p shaker set, but you have obviously gone out and bought the brains already, and I have a set of bull terriers that give me seasoning, so I won’t overload you with s&p. Available from various sources (sauces, haha) but usually around £20.
Taking a trip back to Etsy (always my wildcard!) I have found… Some amazing finds. Dear god. Hold me back from blowing my whole student budget: I could quite happily BUY Etsy if I had the funds. Here, we have soap, but not just any soap. User bubblegenius makes a variety of soaps on this theme, but this one has to be my favourite. Priced at $7.50 (£4.80), I give you: GLOW IN THE DARK SOAP.
In your element – Uranium – glow in the dark soap
Etsy is crammed full of geeky t-shirts, but to me that’s a little too obvious. I only have the one geek-shirt, and that’s a Hello Kitty one. So instead, I had a hunt around for something science-related but with an everyday use, and found this adorable notepad from nutandbee – and as every student knows, notepads are always useful! Especially cute ones! $4.50, or £2.90 in English money. (warning: browsing her shop may damage your “awwwwww” glands)
OK, because I could damage my bank account if I stay on Etsy too long, let’s move away. Remember, you can always stab words into the search engine and lose half a day. I turn away from Chemistry now (it’s not the only science, you know! Just probably the most obvious for novelty gifts) and towards Natural History - palaeontology to be precise. Christmas is soon. Have you got your decorations? No? Fairy lights even? Hmm. Then your home might be crying out for these beauties, £28 from the Natural History Museum:
Staying with the NHM for my final gift idea – some of you may remember my first ever guest post on someone’s blog, when Angharad kindly offered me a spot on Edible Glitter. There, I suggested you get prints of your favourite images done, rather than picking out production line generic nonsense from Ikea (ARGH the wiggly tree). NHM offers a huge range of wildlife prints, all award winning beauties of nature. Have a browse. Get you favourite animal on a poster and have it framed. It’ll look gorgeous, I promise. I would go for this adorable picture (obviously not going to lift photos like that from NHM website).
Have a browse around their print shop – prices start at as little as £15 for a small poster.
And happy shopping! Stay tuned for the next instalment next Friday
Adventures into my brain: TMS
OK, I have to start by bursting your bubble of anticipation and tell you: I did NOT have TMS yesterday. Woe is me, but I am not allowed to have it at the moment, due to meds. Massive disappointment! We were all set and ready to go, did the final screening check and…. Bummer. I was disappointed. Magalena, Manali and Joe were disappointed. I apologised for wasting their time, but they were really lovely and apologised for wasting MY time (as if! I had a wonderful time!)
But all was not lost – I still spent about an hour at UCL with Magdalena and Manali, as they explained the process to me and answered all my questions.
They began with a quick description of how TMS works: as I understand it, a huge electrical current is sent through the figure of eight coil (which, as I mentioned previously, is insulated) – this creates an electromagnetic field, which will stimulate anything within a few centimetres of it (in the case of neuroscientific studies, this would be neurons in specific areas of the brain). Magdalena was allowed to give me a quick demo of how it works by zapping my arm (but not my head) – holding the coil over my right forearm, she set the machine to five short, successive pulses. I kept my hand still. When she turned on the machine, I watched my hand twitch, five times. It was incredibly bizarre.
So, applied to neurons, this stimulation causes neurons to fire, which then means that they’re effectively busy – if you wanted those neurons to do something else, too bad. This is especially interesting as it can help neuroscientists to work out which areas of the brain are involved in what particular cognitive functions. Dr Devlin and his team are currently doing research into language processing, and the involvement of the supramaginal gyrus. The purpose of the initial MRI scan was to pinpoint the location of MY supramarginal gyrus.
And this is where my uncommonly shaped brain becomes a challenge: there are large folds on either side of the brain (damnit, I can’t for the life of me remember the name), and on typical brains, this fold runs backwards and then curves up. My right side does – my left side runs straight backwards (if any of the UCL team are fact checking me, please feel free to set the record straight – I should have taken notes!) Now, this is a problem because locating the supramarginal gyrus usually relies on pinpointing the top of the upwards curve of this fold. But on my left side, there is no upwards curve, and this is the side that they wanted to zap with TMS. Bummer.
However, when I arrived at the lab yesterday, they had pinpointed six possible areas for activation, so were all ready to go. Obviously, we didn’t “go”, but the data is all there if and when I return in the future to have my TMS (I’m hoping early next year).
But that wasn’t all they could show me – they also attached a groovy head strap to me, and pointed me at a camera. Then, using a pointer, Magdalena and Manali were able to map my ears and nose to the ears and nose of my 3D MRI image. Now, when I moved, so did the 3D image on screen; it was fascinating. The TMS coil can interact with the camera system, meaning that if Magdalena were to hold the coil up to my head, the computer would tell her whether or not it was positioned in the right place (with regards to one of those six regions I mentioned earlier).
But enough stalling. I desperately want to show you the images of my brain. I’m very proud of my brain. Joe said that the detail on my cerebellum came out particularly well, so I must have been lying very still indeed. He sent me a high resolution file of all the images, plus a link to the software used to run it, so I played with this all evening yesterday – I can zoom through my 3D brain, through all three planes! Very exciting. Although a little creepy to plunge through my own eyeballs.
Obviously it’s more exciting to see your own brain than someone else’s, but I hope you like these. I have labelled just a couple of areas of interest (my nice frilly cerebellum, and my chunky corpus collosum, the massive connector between the two hemispheres), because I didn’t want to crowd the images (plus, I’m lazy). Enjoy!
Fancy getting up close and personal with your own brain? Dr Devlin and his team are keen to get more eager volunteers for their research. Obvious no-nos are people with metal in their bodies, but they have a screening process, so they will let you know whether or not you’re eligible. Feel free to get in touch with them via Joe, and tell them I sent you!
Image credits: thank you to the Neurobiology of Language lab for taking pictures of my brain, and to Magdalena for letting me pose with the TMS machine! I had a wonderful time, and hope to see you again soon in the not-to-distant future
DISCLAIMER: Views and scientific inaccuracies expressed here are my own. If you want to correct me in any way, please get in touch!
Christmas: Brains!
OK, I’m going to do a series of posts leading up to Christmas: thematic gift ideas. Today’s theme is: BRAINS!
A bit of an odd one this. Brains aren’t for everyone (in fact, I’ve met many people who have given up on their own entirely), but I for one think brains are cool. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be on the road to neuropsychologydom.
First up, some neurons. Very, very important little blighters, these. So why not have a cuddly one? OK, the cell-plushies may not be news to some of you, but they are utterly adorable. My favourites at the moment are the “brain cell” and the “nerve cell” – look at their wee faces!!
You can buy these little guys from a variety of places, but notably I saw them in the Natural History Museum only recently. Very cool. Priced at around £7, but they do come in a few different sizes, so shop around.
Still on the subject of neurons, I had a quick search on Etsy for “brains” (you’d be amazed at how much comes up!!) and I found the beautiful creations of toybreaker. Including this gorgeous silk-screened design, priced at $30 (about £19):
Nervous Energy (aka Fried Brains) silkscreened microfibre tie
Staying with Etsy for a moment, there seems to be a craze for vintage anatomical drawings in the crafting community. Fine by me, as they can be made into pretty fridge magnets such as this one from CrowBiz, priced at a mere $6 (about £4):
Here’s a find that went straight on to my Amazon Wish List – a brain colouring book?! Genius!! Get yours quick – it’s only £8.99!
The Human Brain: Colouring Book
Here’s one for the dinner table: brain shaped salt and pepper shakers! I wonder which hemisphere corresponds to what seasoning… It’s on ThinkGeek, and is therefore in dollars, at $9.99. Just over £6.
And finally, probably my personal favourites (because I love novelty shaped things, and I have many ice cube trays to attest to this): BRAIN FREEZE. Brain shaped ice cubes. Would make for the most awesome cocktail party ever. Why do psychology conferences not have these? It’d break the ice at parties (whaaa whaaaaaa… That’s the bad pun trumpet, by the way). I have seen these turn up in a lot of different shops – Hunterian Museum gift shop, the Science Museum shop (do I spend too much time in museum gift shops? Oh well…). They’re available on all sorts of websites, so browse around. The cheapest I could find them was on the website linked below, a mere £4.99.
So concludes the first instalment in my Quirky Christmas Gift Guide. I have a few more ideas for themes lined up, but as always, your feedback is always welcome. Got a theme you want me to explore? Suggest it in comments! And happy shopping 
Baroness Susan Greenfield: The Brain of the Future
Wow. Wow wow wow. Reeling. Having just gotten in from the abovenamed talk, details still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d start drafting this right now. OK, so by the time this has been posted, the lecture will be but another day in the past, but right now… Wow.
OK, maybe I should explain. I spent the day with my lovely friend (and fellow MSc’er) Rebecca – we did “intellectual stuff”, which culminated in a long anticipated BPS talk from the wonderful Baroness Susan Greenfield. The talk was entitled: “The Brain of the Future: The impact of new technology on how we think and feel”. I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect, but that was fine, because Greenfield covered an awful lot in one hour. It helps that she is incredibly charismatic, concise and fast-talking.
She began by telling us that we were in a century of change. Maybe a throwaway idiom, but it set the scene for the lecture. She proceeded to briefly recall her personal experience of holding a human brain whilst she was still a student: I don’t know if it was the first time she had held a brain, but she reflected on her feelings from the time – what if she were not wearing gloves? Would she catch under her nail that part of someone’s memory, someone’s capacity for love, or creativity? The material brain, so fragile, holds host to our own individual minds, our unique, profound experiences.
Greenfield thus illustrated in this way the fundamental uniqueness of human experience – “no one can see the world through your eyes”*.
This is why it is so wonderful to be a human being. But what is it that we do best? We learn, of course. We, with our big, human brains, have a fantastic ability to adapt. The brain is very plastic (able to be moulded, that is): our neuronal connections and the configurations of brain grow as we grow, responding to our experiences and building on rehearsal. The exciting thing is, you don’t need to be physically DOING the actions to forge the connections: imagination is incredibly powerful. Greenfield quoted one of the developers behind L-dopa, “thinking is movement confined to the brain” to highlight this phenomenon.**
Greenfield went on to show what a great impact “enriched environments” can have on neuronal network developments in rats. The difference between these and “isolation” controls was astounding. It’s quite obvious that the development of our brains is incredibly sensitive to our environments. Our personal brain (i.e. our own configuration of neuronal connections) is driven by our unique experiences.
So there appears to be two major “states” – the sensory brain (like that of children, a “booming, buzzing confusion”) and the cognitive brain. A healthy balance of the two is perfect in adults, but it’s obvious that this is not true of everyone: there are people who are overly cognitive, and those of us who get lost in the buzzing confusion again (senility, schizophrenia, drug abuse and so forth).
Greenfield went on to cover the slightly controversial topic of children’s growing “screen time” – is our increasing exposure to and immersion in a virtual world eroding our ability to think cognitively? Research suggests that whilst computer games may help our children’s increasing IQ scores (by helping to practice mental agility, and so forth), this does not equate to knowledge: just because we can perform certain problem solving tasks with ease does not mean that we are “smarter”. Our children are beginning to live in a strongly sensory environment that fosters a short attention span – there is no room for metaphor and abstract concepts. Information processing they can do, but anyone interested in theory of mind will tell you: information processing is not equal to understanding. We need our conceptual framework (a strong argument behind why computers can’t think).
In human communication, words play a limited role: we communicate through body language, physical contact, tone of voice… With the Facebook generation, these skills are falling by the wayside - will our children grow up to be poor communicators? It’s a genuine worry.
Baroness Greenfield covered more ground than I could possibly relay here: our sense of identity, Yaka-Wow, the consequence of our actions, the under-functioning prefrontal cortex, and even one of my favourite topics: cyborgs (she referred to transhumanism, and used the delightful phrase “brains on chips“).
It’s clear that technology is revolutionising our lives, and our brains are able to adapt to accommodate it. We now have a generation of “digital natives”: but what consequences does this have for humans as a social species? Maybe Baroness Greenfield’s book can tell me.
Oh yes. And a final thing:
Oh, the geeky glory
-
Image credits: HAH. They’re mine. MINE. Well, Rebecca kindly took the photo of me and the wonderful Baroness Greenfield. Thank you, Rebecca
*I may have mentioned this before, but this links in to one of the base causes behind my depression: the fundamental loneliness of human experience. No one will EVER know what it is to be you.
** Google tells me that she has used this quote quite frequently in talks. I can see why.
Animal Snaps
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of going to the Natural History Museum with Angharad – the reason for our visit was this year’s wonderful Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibit. As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn’t go to last year’s and I thoroughly regretted it. I am so very glad that I went this time around.
Obviously, I cannot post any of the gallery’s images here: that would be seriously naughty. However, you can browse some of the winning images online at the NHM’s website. Maybe it will make you want to see the images up close at the exhibit: they are wonderfully presented, and with supporting text (some from the photographer, some information about the subject matter) which really gives the images extra depth. I particularly liked the Urban Wildlife category (bunnies in Paris!) and the ptarmigan in the snow also really caught my eye.
There were several upsetting images, especially the photojournalist Mark Leong’s winning entry “It’s just an animal”: a series of images observing the international markets for illegal animal products. However difficult these images were to look at, they also illustrate a very important point. I assume I do not need to spell it out here.
Angharad and I did disagree with the judges for some of the winning images, particularly the overall winner: perhaps we are just philistines, with no knowledge of artistic composition, but neither of us felt that the overall winner was the best of the lot. By all means, it was a great photo, but it didn’t inspire the same sense of wonder or amazement as some of the other images did. The landscape photos were particularly awe-inspiring.
So what are you waiting for? Take a look. GO AND SEE IT for real. While you’re there, take in some of the other, permanent galleries. NHM has a lot to offer, so off you trot. Tickets are only priced at Adult £9, Family £24 (up to 2 adults and up to 3 children), Child and concessions £4.50. It’s of course free to Members, Patrons and children aged 3 and under. Angharad and I took a good two hours to have a proper look at everything, so it’s like going to the flippin’ cinema. Then you can do the inevitable and browse the gift shop: your favourite images, on a puzzle etc. I bought three postcards – a very reasonable 50p each. If you want, you can go the whole hog and get one printed on canvas, a metre across. Now, that’d make a lovely piece of artwork in your home.
It won’t be around forever: 22 October 2010 – 11 March 2011. So what are you waiting for?
Image credits: get knotted! I took that myself!
Packed Lunch: Brains
OK, I don’t eat brains for lunch: rather, I spent my lunch time, with Rebecca, at the Wellcome Collection yesterday, being talked to about brains.
The speaker was Dr Joe Devlin, a neuroscientist from UCL (just down the road from the Wellcome Collection), and he had come to talk about transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – I knew a couple of things about TMS from the BNS conference a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t really know how it worked. Originally, I had written off going to this talk at all (we have lectures on a Wednesday) but thanks to the tube strike, lectures were cancelled!! I have to say a big thank you to the tube strikers for that – I was still able to easily get to Euston due to London’s other fabulous transport connection, the overground.
As we walked into the Forum on the 1st floor, Rebecca and I were delighted to see a faux-picnic set up: the small stage was covered in fake grass, and there were a couple of picnic baskets filled with apples, which we helped ourselves to. We sat ourselves right in the front row, and had our lunch.
Soon, the speaker and host filed in, sat down, and introduced themselves. If someone could remind me of the host’s name, I’d be very grateful… Anyway, we were told the talk was being recorded for their podcast, so the structure (for the first half hour) would be fairly formal.
In the talk, Devlin told us what TMS was, how it works, and what it can be used for. In brief: TMS involves passing a huge (about 2 tesla) electric current through a copper coil (insulated!) which, through electromagnetic induction, generates an electric current and subsequent magnetic field. When the coil is held next to the head, this magnetic field causes brain “interference” by stimulating neurons in the immediate area of contact. TMS is kept to short pulses (within milliseconds).
My physics is not fantastic, so I didn’t completely understand the “how” of TMS, but I did understand the “why” as it were: by creating interference in certain brain regions, and then observing the effects this has on subjects’ ability to complete certain tasks, we can begin to pinpoint what involvement that brain region has in certain brain functions. Devlin’s research has been followed the effect of TMS on our processing of spoken language: by using TMS whilst people listened to different words (and deciding whether they were real or made-up words), Devlin has been able to explore the effect of visualising on our ability to analyse speech. Yes, visualising: when we learn to read, we learn to imagine how words are spelled when we hear them spoken.
This brought up interesting questions during the Q&A session – is TMS dangerous? Can it be used therapeutically? Does it have any similarities with ECT? And my questions: has Devlin tried this TMS test on 1) illiterate subjects or 2) synaesthetes (who have very strong cross-modal connections), and finally 3) is he looking for eager subjects?
That’s right. I would love to experience TMS. I would also love to be in an fMRI scanner, and have EEG and MEG. So, if you are a neuroscientist or neuropsychologist and you want me, I’m your gal.
The talk really was good fun – I learnt something (well, many things) new, in a really lovely environment, with charismatic and amusing speakers. Plus, the rest of the audience was lovely – very knowledgeable, and chatty after the talk was over (I chatted to one lady about her experiences of ECT). I gave Devlin my details – hopefully I’ll get to experience TMS soon.
Rebecca and I had a brief look around the Wellcome Collection, especially their fantastic book shop – we will be back soon to explore the Collection in more detail.
The Wellcome Collection is just across the road from Euston station. It is completely free, and is open most days (notably not Mondays). They have a nice later opening day on Thursday – 10am-10pm! They also have a lovely looking café – we’ll be trying that next time we’re there.
Image credits: Packed Lunch banner from Wellcome Collection website, the others are my own.
Rowdy kids and their brain activity
I had the privilege of attending another UCL Institute of Clinical Neuroscience seminar on Monday. This time, Prof. Ian Goodyer of the University of Cambridge came to talk to us about the neurobiology of Conduct Disorders.
I must admit, Conduct Disorder (CD) is a new one on me. Part of me wanted to just scoff and say “well, that’s just brattish children”, or maybe to suggest that it’s the early signs of a Personality Disorder (PD): neither is true. CD displays a range of very particular, severely anti-social behaviours, some of which are very similar to some PDs, but CD is particular to the 18-and-unders (children and adolescents). In to adulthood, people with CD may develop an antisocial PD, but it isn’t an accurate predictor: predicting later mental health issues from childhood behaviours is an incredibly difficult thing. Apparently, the greatest predictor of adult depression is NOT childhood depression, but irritability. Hence the need to differentiate between childhood and adult psychopathologies: a lot of brain development goes on as we grow, and our mental layout changes with it.
Psychiatrists also differentiate between two types of CD: Early Onset CD and Adolescent Onset CD. EO-CD presents in children under the age of about 10yrs, but seems to lessen with age. AO-CD on the other hand seems to occur as a learned behaviour, as individuals’ mimicry of already deviant peers: adolescents presenting AO-CD may not have had any sort of disorder when they were younger, but develop this in reaction to peergroups.
We already have evidence that patients presenting EO-CD have neuropsychological impairments, neurophysiological abnormalities and hormone abnormalities such as atypical cortisol levels (ahha! I know about cortisol now!) What Goodyer and his team have been researching is whether this is also true of AO-CD: if AO-CD is truly just mimicking behaviour based on peer-pressure or social affectation, and not based in neurophysiology. If AO-CD is truly distinct from EO-CD in this way, then patients presenting AO-CD should show similar test scores to normal controls on things such as empathy tests and so forth: they should not show the same scores as EO-CD. AO-CD and EO-CD, if truly different, should show distinct neurobiological characteristics.
But Goodyer and his colleagues have not found this: instead, AO and EO-CD both show similar results in empathy tests (i.e. they don’t seem to display much), they show similar responses to stress, both behaviourally and in terms of cortisol levels, and they both show similar problems in recognising facial expressions.
Goodyer has also run MRI scans for both groups and compared them to normal controls (he also had to go back and retest, after realising he would have to covary for ADHD). Again, both CD groups had very similar abnormalities in brain activity.
If EO and AO-CD are so similar in physiology and psychology, then why does AO-CD only emerge in adolescence? Why is it that EO-CD occurs early on, and AO-CD, statistically identical, doesn’t? This is proving a problem for the taxonomic theory. Perhaps something is preventing the onset of AO-CD in early childhood, or the reverse, that something is causing EO-CD to develop early. We’ve looked at the physiology, but perhaps what we need is a longitudinal study of environment – of course, this is fraught with ethical problems, but it looks to be the missing piece. Perhaps children susceptible to either form of CD are always going to be neurobiologically vulnerable, but depending on their upbringing and subsequent peer-groups, they may or may not actually exhibit any symptoms.
Image credits: from UCL website
Books: Musicophilia
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
That’s more like it! After having a rather disappointing time with Daniel Levitin last week, Oliver Sacks delivered. Like his famous The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (and most of his other books), Musicophilia follows various case studies – this time, evidently, all related to music. Sacks offers us a potted history of each of his patients, with touching personal insight into their plight. It feels to me that Sacks is getting more sensitive with age – he used to be accused of being too detached from the humanity of his patients, treating them as oddities rather than people, but Musicophilia defies this accusation. Sacks connects with his patients, and some of the passages are not only very poignant, but show Sacks’ deep admiration for their ability to overcome adversity, sometimes in ingenious ways.
To give an example, Sacks talks of the famous amnesic, Clive Wearing who, despite not being able to remember anything that has happened more than a minute or so ago, is still able to play the piano and organ with the same fluency and skill as he could before he suffered the brain damage he bears today (as a result of severe encephalitis). This musicality is Clive’s link to his “former self”, as attested to by his wife.
Sacks also relates strange tales of musical hallucinations, of amusia and musical dystonia. He lets us in to the musical world of people with Williams syndrome and of the musical savants. But for me, the most incredible and moving thing of all is the obvious relief that music brings: helping people with Tourettes to channel their energy, giving people with dementia a pathway to their past, giving rhythm and the gateway to movement to people with Parkinsons, and expression to aphasics, who are unable to connect with language in any other way.
I have a couple of very minor issues: firstly, with the fact that Sacks revisits a lot of previously covered cases (ones mentioned already in his other books, which he could then ask you to read as well), and secondly Sacks really over uses footnotes. There was a footnote ever few pages, and some were incredibly long. In fact, some pages were more footnote than main body text. However, as I said: minor issues. These did not detract from the book’s wonderfulness.
It is a beautiful book, tempering science with humanity, and giving us an insight into worlds far detached from our own – some cases may be familiar (the stories touching upon depression were quite uncomfortable for me) but others are other-worldly. It gives a true appreciation of the breadth of human experience, and the wonder of music that connects us all.
A Royal Institution Birthday – Part 2
Welcome back, chaps. I’m writing this is the car, on the way back from a lovely (if sadly cut-short) weekend in Suffolk. But you’ll hear more about that tomorrow. (EDIT: Just brought to my attention: Don’t worry! It’s nothing sinister. Just a lot to get done before the start of a working week meant that we had to leave early in the morning!)
So, where did we get to yesterday? Ah yes, we were at the Royal Institution, we’d just gluttoned ourselves into a sticky toffee stupor, and, looking at the clock, it was time to get moving for the night’s lecture. In fact, no sooner had I asked the waiter for the bill but the bell was rung for the 15 minute warning – we needed to get ourselves seated upstairs in the lecture hall. No time to find our cocktail companions for later – we needed to get moving! Apparently, we passed Angharad and Paul in a blur – they were having a quick pre-talk drink in the Time&Space bar. But it’s all right – they found us on the stairs and so we made our way into the lecture hall together.
My one criticism of the Royal Institution’s lecture theatre is that it is not kind to the tall. Not a problem for me (as I am a short arse) but not so good for Paul or the even taller Ben. But the lads did not complain, bless ‘em (especially as Ben managed to land himself by the aisle, so he could stretch his legs out there).
Before the talk started, I saw Rebecca and her friend Chantal come in and seat themselves at the opposite side of the theatre – I saw Rebecca looking around, and then wave jovially when she caught sight of us. There would be time for introductions and chat in the bar after the talk.
The night’s lecture was the monthly Friday Evening Discourse: an event exclusively for members and their guests (of which I had brought three, hurrah!) Every last-Friday-of-the-month, a guest speaker is invited to talk about their subject for a maximum one hour (it is timed and signalled by a bell), and this is followed by a 15-minute Q&A session, open to the audience. I have been to some fantastic FEDs since I joined the RI at the beginning of the year, including one about the nature/nurture debate, and a presentation about the therapeutic effects of Lithium.
But this month, it was “Rhythms of the Body”, a talk presented by Prof. Stafford Lightman from the University of Bristol He took us through a brief definition of bio-rhythms, and the various different cycles that living creatures follow (annual, seasonal, lunar/tidal, and of course the daily 24-hour cycles shared by so many organisms) – heliotropes, a group of flowering plants, will faithfully follow a 24-hour cycle of blooming and closing, even if kept in complete darkness.
Next, he went on to explain the underlying cortisol fluctuations that keep us human beings in a happy circadian rhythm. It used to generally be accepted that cortisol levels fluctuated evenly throughout the day, linking to energy levels (plotted, the projected cortisol levels resemble the familiar bell-curve). However, scientific analysis has revealed that cortisol levels fluctuate throughout the day, coming in regular pulses (spikes on a graph), with the pulses getting bigger during the main part of the day, then dying down again at night. These cortisol levels pulse due to a delayed response to neural pulses – Lightman helpfully gave the analogy of a cranky old shower (we’ll ignore the fact that he confused Mr Burns and Homer Simpson on his slides). Imagine you’re in the shower: it’s too cold, so you turn the heat up. But there is a delay, so you turn it up again. When the first increase-signal gets through, great, the shower is at the perfect temperature, but soon the second increase-signal gets through and suddenly the shower is too hot. So you turn the heat down a bit. But again, because of the delay, it remains hot, so you turn it down again. Guess what happens – first it’s perfect, but soon it overshoots (you impatient thing) and it’s too cold again. Repeat ad infinitum. Cortisol pulses in a similar way through a hypothalamus-pituatary-adrenal pathway (involving AVP, CRH, ACTH and finally cortisol), giving us the characteristic spikes.
Cortisol is an anticipatory hormone, and so overall it averages out as that bell-curve over a 24-hour cycle. This anticipation prepares you to act in times of stress and situations involving threat – as a mouse without cortisol, you wouldn’t be prepared to run if the cat was looking at you funny. But you can’t be in a sustained state of anticipation: the mathematics of the feedback/feedforward loop forbid this, as with a sustained high level of cortisol, the oscillating effect cannot occur.
This might explain the desensitisation effect observed in those suffering from continual high levels of stress (such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the recently defined Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder) who need stronger stimuli in order to become engaged emotionally and psychologically.
Cortisol also spikes up in response to stress – and since there is a delay, we can feel the effects of cortisol for some time after the stress-inducing event has actually occurred. So hopefully it’s apparent that interruptions to regular cortisol levels will have an impact on our circadian rhythm: I’m sure we’ve all experienced the effects of stress on our sleeping pattern, and the subsequent effect on our energy levels. Eventually, the circadian rhythm will reassert itself, but you won’t feel top notch in the meantime. And I’m sure we all know that chronic stress can lead to serious physical ill health.
So the circadian rhythm is important, and cortisol levels help to regulate that. So why are we so cruel to our circadian rhythms? Shift-work, staying up late… It’s not good for you. Abnormal cortisol patterns are linked to depression and anxiety, chronic fatigue, memory problems, hypertension…
This was probably the shortest talk I’ve ever been too, but that was by no means a bad thing – it meant we had plenty of time for the Q&A sessions. And a lot of interesting questions were asked: about links to depression, about the change in cortisol fluctuations as we age, about whether or not stress is good for us. Even I asked a question, about the circadian rhythm and Seasonal Affective Disorder: if heliotropes can flower in darkness, why do I need a lightbox to see me through the winter months? And are their any flowers with SAD? Rebecca followed with an interesting question about the increase in the occurrence of breast cancer in women who do shift work and therefore work at odd hours (and therefore disrupt their circadian rhythms).
Overall, a thoroughly interesting talk. And how better to follow this up by returning to Time&Space (this time to their bar and lounge) to discuss the talk over cocktails?
We cosied ourselves away on a couple of sofas with Angharad, Paul, Rebecca and Chantal. Time&Space do some fantastic cocktails, so it’s definitely worth a look in, even if you’re not going for a lecture. I managed to get through a Pink Mojito, a Dragon Fly and a Grand Mimosa. Unfortunately, Rebecca and Chantal had to take off around 10:30pm, but Ben and I stayed chatting with Angharad and Paul until we were pretty much asked to leave… We caught a black cab back to Streatham, and crawled into bed, tipsy and content.
A final shout out must go out to Angharad and her wonderful new shoes. That is all I have to say. Yes, they are that good that they need their own mention
Image credits: ultra cute rat from http://www.desicolours.com, Time&Space bar from RIGB website, and lecture hall was my own
A Royal Institution birthday
I would like to report that Ben’s birthday was a complete success. Hurrah! He thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of it, including the fact that he is, at time of writing, still asleep.
Around 4pm, I got dolled up and made my way through town to meet him at his office. I sat and read for a while whilst he got changed into his lovely formal evening wear. I need to quickly mention that Ben is the King of Charity Shop Trawling: the dress I wore for the evening was one of his finds (gorgeous) but so too was his suit. Not only does it fit wonderfully (he is tall and broad shouldered, so finding anything to fit is a bit of a mission), but it only cost about a fiver. I honestly don’t know how he does it.
Anyway, he changed into Dapper Evening Fox, and we made our way towards Green Park, and the Royal Institution. I had booked us a table for two in their Time&Space restaurant, for 6pm, and we had timed it beautifully. We were lead into their gorgeous dining room and seated in a cosy corner by the window.
The Time&Space restaurant is in-keeping with the style of the rest of the Royal Institution: a lot of this is offered by the architecture of the building itself (high ceilings, large rooms) but the decor matched in too (scientific journals lined the bookshelves, and the furniture was simple, smart and dark). The lighting was easy on the eye and befitting a quiet dining room, and I was surprised to noticed absolutely no ambient music. At first this was strange, but I actually really liked it: it added to the beautifully hushed library feel, and I found myself able to hear Ben’s conversation much easier.
As soon as we sat down, we were offered a bottle of water – good call, waiter man. Even the water glasses were cool – like wine glasses without stems. We were a little distracted by discussing the room itself, so the waiter had to come back several times before we’d made food choices (sorry!) – in the meantime I thought I’d treat Ben to a stonkingly good wine, in the form of my favourite, a Pinot Noir. What I actually chose (Chilcas Single Vineyard, 2007, Central Valley, Chile) got substituted with an Alamos Seleccion (2009, Mendoza, Argentina), but it was so good (and a bit cheaper!) that I really didn’t mind. Ben is not much of a wine drinker, so had no idea what to expect, but enthused about its smoothness, and how it was rich but not over-powering. We will have him yet!!
Even the complimentary bread was nice. Usually that’s not worth noting I guess, but it all helps. When we finally got around to ordering, we decided to “risk it” by ordering things when we weren’t entirely sure what they were – maybe that would be my one criticism of Time&Space, is their unnecessary use of little-used terms. You don’t need to use a “posh” version of black pudding (boudin noir? Really?) and, as girolles are not a common thing to find on any menu, it would help your “phillistine” diners if you could supplement it by saying “girolle mushrooms”.
Anyway, after ordering, the starters arrived swiftly, which was great as I was hungry hungry. Ben went for a fried duck egg, sat on a bed of black pudding (call it what it is) and served with some crisp fried new potatoes. The black pudding was not like greasy-spoon black pudding: it was light but rich, with a herby flavour to it. I think it had mushroom in as well, which was a nice touch. I went for those mushrooms I mentioned: Scottish girolles on a bed of whipped (read: mash) potato. It was very, very tasty (the girolles were like yellow Oyster mushrooms, and the mash gorgeously smooth) but a little on the small side. Perhaps for the best though, as for mains…. I went for steak.
Yes, a 10oz Rib Eye beauty, cooked to perfection (flame grilled so it was slightly caramelised on the outside, yet still beautifully rare in the middle) and served with amazing frites and bearnaise sauce in a cute tiny saucepan (hard to describe, they were good). It was all presented on a lovely wooden board (very rustic – love it) but I was a bit confused by the two sun-blushed tomatoes on top of my steak, nice as they were.
Meanwhile, Ben was already tucking in to his braised beef flank, with a herby breadcrumb crust. The beef had been slow-cooked to perfection: very soft, juicy meat, and packed with flavour. It was served on top of a bed of garlic-scented leeks, with sauteed mushrooms and a bone-marrow sauce. I think he got the better deal out of the two of us: whilst I really love a good steak frites (and mine was GOOD) Ben’s beef was just more “special”. It was all presented beautifully, and the portion size was perfect.
How to top it off then? Well Ben, it’s your birthday – let’s go the whole hog and have pudding. Waiter? Two coffees and two sticky toffee puddings please. Oh yes.
The coffees were… well, they were coffees. But the warm milk was a nice touch (didn’t make the coffee tepid!) but the PUDDINGS. My oh my. These weren’t cheap puds, doused within an inch of their lives in sauce – they were soft domes of hot, sweet loveliness (yes, food IS rather erotic), topped with a ball of gently melting vanilla ice cream. The sauce was hot and not overly abundant. The puddings disappeared very swiftly which, despite our already full bellies, gives you an idea of how delicious they were.
OK, all this talk of food is making my lose my ability to be coherent. Plus, I think this post is now long enough. Which means you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the conclusion of Benny’s Royal Institution Birthday Gala! Hold on to your hats, chaps – there’s SAD flowers, geriatric rats, cocktails and gorgeous shoes to look forward to!
Image credits: first one from Mark Whitfield (Daily Telegraph), all the rest are mine
