The mind is what the brain does

The title is the brief explanation for “mind” given in Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. I don’t like the definition because it leaves out the other things that the brain does. In short, the mind is all brain, but the brain isn’t all mind. If it was, we would constantly hear “My heart is beating, Breathe in, My heart is meating, Breathe out, Blood Ph normal.” That would get annoying.

Michael Egnor has a response to a post by Steven Novella (They’ve been arguing about this for a while now) in which Egnor attempts to laugh off Novella’s arguments against dualism. Egnor blogs for Evolution News & Views, part of the Discovery Institute.

Egnor argues that “salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’) seem to be impossible to explain materialistically.” I think he’s full of crap, and I’ll explain why for a few of his issues. Specifically, I’ll be talking about qualia and free will.

Remember, I have a Regents Bachelor of Arts degree with an emphasis on psychology and two semesters of philosophy under my belt, which means I sometimes ask questions that seem new to me that are old hat to others. But I read a lot, so I think I can get through this. What I would like to propose is a thought experiment.

A child is born without the ability to see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. The only exception is that the child can feel (without tasting) if something is in his mouth or throat. His body is also able to monitor all of his internal organs, but not his skin. After a series of tests, doctors determins that there is nothing wrong with the child’s brain, but connective nerves are either severed or dead. The baby will eat, which allows him to stay alive, but cannot hold onto his bottle.

Now, the following questions: Would the child be capable of thought? Could you ever teach the child anything? Does the child have a sense of self, or is it possible to have a sense of self when you have no connection with the outside world?

If someone could answer these questions, I’ll talk about free will in relation to the answers.

Record High Army Suicides

One  more before I go off to bed. Army suicides are at a record high since they started keeping statistics in 1980. One comment in the article questions whether we are seeing the effect of added stress as soldiers serve longer and more frequent duty assignments due to low enrollment. The current rate is 20.2 per 100,000, compared to something like 11 per 100,000 in the general population. There were also 144 suicides among the 500,000 who left duty between 2002-2005. (If my math is right, that’s 28.8 per 100,000.)

There has been a call for more mental health services available to active duty servicemen. A newspaper article I read last year stated that there were signifigant hazards involved for mental health workers, who are expected to go into potential heavy-fire zones in order to help soldiers. As you can imagine, this is not appealing to many mental health workers.

As a guy who grew up very blue-collar, I am fascinated by people who are resistant to therapy. I may be going out on a limb, but I would guess that the perceived (and, probably, very real) ribbing from other soldiers would be a big deterrent to someone who wants to seek mental health care. I would imagine that some of the welders, mechanics, truckdrivers, and bricklayers I grew up around would feel the same way. I think one of the greatest things that social service workers could do is to find ways to end the stigma of even casual mental health care so that those who feel that they need help wont be ostracized.

Down but not quite out

I’m trying to quit smoking. I’ve held out okay, but I’ve been coughing like crazy for two days. I thought my lungs were trying to clear themselves, but today it got worse, and my daughter sounds hoarse, so I think I’m actually sick. On top of all of this, I’m craving a smoke like crazy and the only substitute I have is cough drops. Lovely.

If I want to really quit, I should fly out to San Francisco and get acupuncture. Of course, I could also shove needles in my eyes for the same effect.

Stay well, everyone.

This is Your Brain on Technology

A  study from UCLA finds that the increased use of technology has led to a decline in critical thinking and analysis and improvelents in visual skills. The study recomends using mujltiple forms of media in the classroom to improve different skills. The researchers analyzed over 50 studies, with some interesting results. For instance, college students who watched Headline News without the “crawl” remembered more information than those who watched it with the crawl.

This may be related to Bell’s Frontal Nomenclature Hypertrophy Syndrome (Bell’s Syndrome for short). Bells Syndrome is caused by automatic processing which changes the words and spellings in specialized vocabularies in the sciences. This is done through misfires in the spell checker in Microsoft Word.

“Amygdalae” is the plural of “amygdala.”

Derren Brown does Milgram

This is one of those “I’m bored, stuck at home because of all this snow, so I’m scanning YouTube” posts. Here’s one of Derren Brown recreating the Milgram Experiment.

Enjoy!

A case study in missing the point

If I keep piggybacking off of posts from Steven Novella, he’s gonna come after me with a hockey stick.

I’ve never heard of J.B. Handley, but reading the number of times he vomits in this post, I wonder if he may suffer from anorexia nervosa. His major compaint about the thimerosal study I posted on yesterday is that there is not a control for those who received no thimerosal or vaccines. The fact that there was only one cause of autism reported, and that was in the low-thimerosal group (62.5 mcg, vs. 137.5 mcg) doesn’t phase him at all. Like I said yesterday, the evidence doesn’t matter to these people. I bet Handley has a book to sell.

(Actually, Handley is co-founder of Generation Rescue, an AntiVax group. Second-Rate Celebrity Concerned Mother Jenny McCarthy is on the board. So answer me this, Mr. Handley, how much would you stand to lose by accepting that vaccines do not cause? Normally, I wouldn’t ask, except for this little gem in your post:

10. Read the acknowledgements section:
 
“The study was supported in part by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through contract 2002-N-00448 with the Istituto Superiore di Sanita.”
 
11. Vomit.

So, again, How much would you stand to lose?

Another leach that posted on this story was David Kirby. (I note a bit of cultural bias. Both Handley and Kirby use cutesy faux-Italian phrases in their headlines. What do these guys have against Italians?) Kirby spends his entire post whining about limitations of the study, stating that the study contained only healthy children, despite the one child with autism and the, if my memory serves me, 40-odd others with other neurological impairment. Maybe all the children are healthy because there is nothing dangerous about vaccines. Again, how much would Kirby stand to lose if the truth was accepted?

Mutation without Selection

I am by no means an expert in genetics, so I’m reading through an article on PLOS Biology (Referred by ScienceDaily, credit where credit is due) which reports some interesting findings. Apparently there are geners that are evolving at a faster rate than normal with AT-to-GC biased substitutions. Apparently a number of the mutations are actually harmful. The authors are calling this Biased-Gene Conversion. The article states that they don’t expect this BGC bias only in human exons, and they expect different exons to be affected in different species.

I don’t know what all of this means as far as the big picture goes. Anyone out there with sufficient knowledge to explain it?

Purple Hearts for PTSD?

Should the DOD give out purple hearts for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder? Furious Seasons has a short piece about the issue, linking to stories in The Nation and The New York Times. Former Marine captain Tyler E. Boudreau recommends a new medal, a Black Heart, for those who suffer from PTSD due to their service. Eileen Lainez, a DOD spokesperson, had this to say:

“Historically, the Purple Heart has never been awarded for mental disorders or psychological conditions resulting from witnessing or experiencing traumatic combat events (e.g., combat stress reaction, shell-shock, combat stress fatigue, acute stress disorder, or PTSD),”

And some other readers of Stars and Stripes agree with her, but aren’t quite so eloquent:

“Every badge hunter and his brother will have this distinguished award in their sights,” Army Capt. Matthew Nichols wrote in a May letter to the editor.

Which begs the issue: do people try to get into the Army simply to get injured and get a Purple Heart?

I don’t know where to stand on this issue, perhaps because I’m not a veteran. Anyone want to weigh in?

Antipsychiatry

Thomas Szasz is an idiot. Thomas Szasz is, apart from being the only psychiatrist to have a Batman villainnamed after him, the guy responsible for what is known as antipsychiatry, essentially the belief that mental illness does not exist, and that it is all the invention of the pharmaceutical companies to bilk money out of people whose only crime is not being normal. That’s easy to say for someone who has no severe emotional distress.

Hariet Hall, in her wisdom, has a great pieceabout antipsychiatry. I just wanted to touch on a few of the issues.

The problem with psychiatric medications is that the symptomology is subjective and and the drugs are essentially a cash cow. That doesn’t mean they don’t work, but the pharmaceutical industry pushes them so heavily that they often get used for minor behavioral issues when the patient reports exacerbated symptoms to the doctor. Hall points us to a New England Journal of Medicine article which finds that medication plus therapy is more effective than other options for treatment. The complaint that I hear from most psychiatrists is that they don’t have time to practice any signifigant therapy because of managed care and the cost of psychiatry vs. psychotherapy. So how about we agree to not give anyone medications until they see a therapist. And that goes for General Practice doctors as well. I’m still trying to figure out why I see clients on 2 or 3 different SSRIs.

As far as the science thing…we do our best with what we have. Some of us focus all of our energies on trying to find treatments that have been scientifically validated, which means that we are typically cognitive-behavioral therapists. Hall mentions the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, edited by Scott Lilienfeld at Emory University. The journal is excellent, and many of the articles are available for free. Scott is great, too. I sent him an article about emotional freedom therapy (EFT) that I eventually submitted to the APA journal Psychotherapy, and Scott gave me great notes and didn’t complain once about being bothered by some punk kid. (As a matter of fact, I need to send him a fruit basket or something.)

There are many issues that we still need to work on to give psychology and psychiatry the scientific validity that it needs to survive in an age when we can image individual neurons. Szasz does nothing to help the situation.

Why evidence isn’t good enough

I am saddened by the knowledge that, for some people, evidence is not good enough. Maybe they have a political agenda that they are trying to push, or maybe they are gullible. Maybe thet feel like they have to hold onto their beliefs for some other reason. Maybe it’s just easier to blame something on environmental casuses than to think about ideas like genetic mutation.

I am, of course, talking about the autism/vaccines debate that has been goung on for about ten years now. Never have I seen so many good people stand up and fight against frauds and charlitans trying to lure people with false claims and pseudoscience.

The fact is, none of this seems to matter. Steven Novella has a post today about a new study that adds to the research showing that the preservative thimerosal is not correlated with autism. This is great, but it really doesn’t matter. The AntiVax groups and spokespeople don’t really care about autism. They care about pushing the idea that vaccines are unhealthy. Take Andrew Wakefield, for example. His first AntiVax statements didn’t even relate to autism, but to Crohn’s Disease. Wakefield then presented that the MMR vaccine causes autism. When he was shown to be a crackpot who accepted money from ambulance-chasers to conduct his “research,” the story came back, this time with the ethylmercury preservative Thimerosal as the culprit. All hell broke loose, withassholes like David Kirby coming out of the woodwork claiming that the government was poisoning our children. When that lost its flavor, they turned back to MMR, but this time the spokesperson was a media-hungry wench concerned mother, Jenny McCarthy, and evidence was replaced with “mother’s intuition.” You want to know about mother’s intuition? My mother asked me every day of my high school career if I was using drugs, because she was sure I was. I never used until college.

No ammount of evidence matters for these people. They don’t even care about autism. They only care about vaccines being bad. And I fell for it! When I first read the Robert Kennedy article, I was all in. Then I read the science, and thought, gee, Kennedy must be mistaken. Little did I know that this was no mistake. This was a concerted effort on behalf of a few activists to supress science.

You want to know how completely screwed up these people are? California banned the use of thimerosal in 2001. David Kirby later stated, “If the number of three- to five-year-olds [with autism] in the California [health care] system has not declined by 2007, that would deal a severe blow to the autism-thimerosal hypothesis.” Later when evidence came out of California and European Nations which had banned thimerosal in the 1990s which showed that thimerosal had nothing to do with autism, Kirby backpeddled, saying “the committee gave a preponderance of emphasis on epidemiological evidence and rather, I would say, gave short shrift to the biological evidence.” Apparently epidemiology is only okay when David Kirby thinks it will back him up. Does this sound like someone who is looking after the interests of parents, or someone who is trying to line his fat wallet? I’ll bet David Kirby has more to gain from telling you that vaccines are bad than I do by telling you that vaccines are safe.

But none of this matters. They will find more reasons to hate vaccines, even if they have to give up the autism link. In the meantime, Here’s a lecture I went to in December in Arlington, VA. It’s 5 parts. Here is part 1.

Looking at how stress-related disorders affect memory

A new fMRI study has found that patients who suffer emotional disorders that relate to stressful memories may have dysfunctional mechanisms for memory supression. After viewing a list of word pairs, patients were shown one of the words and asked to either recall or supress the paired word. Patients with stressrelated disorders showed greater activation of the hypocampus than controls, which suggests that insufficient activation of the prefrontal cortex may be related to the inability to supress unwanted or traumatic memories.

From what I can tell from the press release, this study had an experimental group of 38 and a control group of 21. Not a definative number, but not too shabby. The authors that that this has implications for psychiatry and the treatment of specific areas of the brain. I see implications for psychology as well. If we accept that these patients have a defecit in supressing traumatic memories, what happens when they confront these memories in therapy and reframe them. In other words, what happens when the patient starts to view the memories as less traumatic than before? Would we then see a behavioral change?

Link to ScienceDaily.

Introducing the Obameter

The St. Petersburg Times, I’m presuming Florida, not Russia*, has set up a website called Politifact containing The Obameter, a way to hold our current president accountable for the campaign promises he made. One of my favorite promises is to double funding for basic science research. We should be able to afford an extra few grand.**

* Yes, I know it’s from Florida. That was a geography joke. A bad one, I know.

** Yes, I realize that current funding for science research is higher than three grand. That was an unfunded mandate joke. Equally poor as the previous geography joke, but not too bad as far as unfunded mandate jokes go.

The Evolution/ID Debate

Yahoo News has a story about the recent evolution/creation/Intelligent Design issues coming out of Texas and Louisiana. It does a pretty good job of laying down the basics for those who haven’t been paying attention.

I want to say this: I’m not a Darwinist. I presume that “Darwinist” means “one who follows Darwin,” similar to Christian or Marxist being one who follows Christ or Marx, respectively. I know thay groups like The Discovery Institute would like everyone to believe that those who accept evolution have the dogmatic faith of Christianity or the idological singlemindedness of a Marxist. No, I’m not a Darwinist because Darwin lived a long time ago, and did not have the scientific knowledge that would come later to validate his theory.

I’m a psychology student. Darwin wrote before the advent of psychotherapy.

The fact is, I don’t believe in Natural Selection because I choose to, I believe it because the evidence supports it. And quite frankly, it is irresponsible for any of these groups to try to push this whole “teach the controversy” campaign. With science scores in the US somewhere south of Latvia, the ID people and the creationists want to put their stamp on the education system by wasting teachers’ and students’ time. You want to talk about gaps in the evolutionary theory, how about the gaps in ID and creationism (like the complete lack of any scientific validation whatsoever?) 

They invent the word “Darwinist” to disparage us, why don’t we come up with a word to disparage them? I’m in favor of “wizard.” Or “child.” They are the first two groups of people who come to mind that believe in magic.

A New Take on Bullying

A new program has been found to decrease bullying by making the whole community involved. The CAPSLE program (Creating a Peaceful School Learning Environment, and the award for most creative acronym of any behavior program) focuses not just on the bully and his victim, but on the bystanders as well. The program was found to foster stronger bystander behaviors, and generate empathy for victams and less positivity for aggression. My favorite part:

Nevertheless, over time the study found that bullies came to be disempowered, initially complaining that the programme was boring and should be stopped until gradually the social system tended to recruit them into more helpful roles. For example, a fifth grade bully who was “humping” the school trophy case to display his sexual prowess to much younger children became a helper of kindergarteners who were upset and helped them with tasks like tying shoelaces.

The study found that, while bullying did increase in the school district where the program was applied, it increased less than in two control districts.

If I remember correctly, one of the bits of research that came out of the bystander effect, which found that people in groups were less likely to assist someone in need than individuals, is that knowledge of the bystander effect can partially alleviate the effect. I wonder if the same thing may be going on here.

Link to ScienceDaily.

Flies Never Sleep When You Try to Swat Them

The Nature Neuroscience Podcast Neuropod has an interview with Leslie Griffith, who has been studying sleep in flies. In the study, researchers alttered the excitability of ventral lateran neurons (LNvs) with GABA, the chief inhibitory transmitter. When it was time to wake the flies up, the LNvs are believed to release a neuropeptide known as PDF.

Griffith believes that this research may help in sleep disorders in humans. Most medication for sleep disorders supress GABA throughout the brain. Griffith believes that it would be advantageous to target sleep medication specifically to the sleep circuit.

Link to Neuropod.

Link to Story on ScienceDaily.