Brains and minds
ddobbs | March 12, 2008The Kirsch study published a few weeks ago has stirred much discussion of the placebo power of antidepressants (or is it the antidepressant power of placebos?); it's clear that the act of taking a pill that you expect to help you often does help you.
But can the availability of a pill meant for depression make you feel (or think of yourself as) depressed? That's the question behind another part of the drug debate, regarding whether the drug industry encourages us to medicalize ordinary experience.
In pondering these things I ran across this fascinating New York Times >article from 2004…
ddobbs | March 6, 2008There's been a lot of attention the last couple years to the possibility of brain-based lie detector tests -- most of it premature. That coverage, I see now, has overlooked (as did I!) a 2005 study that showed compulsive liars are wired differently -- in an unexpected way -- than the rest of us. NPR's Radio Lab covered it this morning. You can get both the text and the audio at NPR: Radio Lab: Into the Brain of a Liar.
Here's the opening:
Morning Edition, March 6, 2008 ·
We all lie -- once a day or so, according to most studies. But usually we tell little lies, like "your new haircut…
ddobbs | February 29, 2008The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the press coverage pretty well. Note that the heavier and higher-profile coverage comes mainly from UK. As far as I can tell, none of the top 3 or 4 US papers have yet covered it.
This blog search should help as well.
Some of the more notable responses since yesterday:
Science weighs in. The Times…
ddobbs | February 28, 2008The Kirsch study I wrote about a couple days ago, which found that antidepressants seem to have no more effect than placebo, has generated a wide variety of reactions in the blogosphere and press. Several things of note here:
1) In a pattern I've noticed repeatedly of late about other types of stories about things in the U.S., this story got much more attention in the British press than it did here in the U.S. (The authors were from the UK, but the paper was published in a U.S.-based journal, and antidepressant use is a huge issue in the U.S.)
2) The responses -- some by bloggers, writers,…
ddobbs | February 27, 2008
A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One.
An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS One) "typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance." They're in what athletes call the zone, where they navigate the oncoming musical terrain by a sort of flexible trained instinct, like boulder-hopping downhill: Think about it and you stumble. Lovely…
ddobbs | January 4, 2008Spatial cognition research is a major interest of mine. This one's a doozy. From ScienceDaily, Jan 3, 2008:
Gay Men Navigate In A Similar Way To Women, Virtual Reality Researchers Find
ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2008)
Gay men navigate in a similar way to women, according to a new study from researchers at Queen Mary, University of London.
Dr Qazi Rahman, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences used virtual reality scenarios to investigate if spatial learning and memory in humans can be linked to sexual orientation.
Differences in spatial learning and memory (…
ddobbs | December 7, 2007
If you've a taste for scholarly review papers (and who doesn't?!) and an interest in fear and learning (ditto), a rigorous but substantial treat awaits you, free, in the January issue of Nature Neuropsychopharmacology. Gregory Quirk, a former post-doc in the lab of fear-research pioneer Joe LeDoux (whom I once profiled in Scientific American Mind, is lead author on a review of what we know about how fear learning is extinguished (a poor term; fears are not so much extinguished as replaced by stronger lessons about not fearing) and then revived. He and co-author Kevin Meuller also discuss…
ddobbs | October 10, 2007
This week's post at Mind Matters, the Scientific American blog I edit, looks at an intriguing study of gene-environment interactions in abused children. Charles Glatt, who wrote the review, outlines the rather encouraging results of this study, which suggest -- with all the usual caveats about wider applicability and replication of results -- that some reliable nurturing can often override even a triple-whammy of two "bad" genes and an abusive home.
Some readers objected, however, to Glatt's assertion that the study argues well for the idea of free will. One reader wrote:
I see no impact…
ddobbs | August 29, 2007
We've long accepted that hormones can make you amorous, aggressive, or erratic. But lately neuroscience has been abuzz with evidence that the hormone oxytocin -- which also acts as a neuromodulator -- can enhance at least one cognitive power: the ability to understand what others are thinking. In this week's Mind Matters (the online blog seminar on mind and brain I edit for Scientific American), Jennifer Bartz and Eric Hollander, two leading researchers in this area, write a review commentary describing a recent paper on oxytocin and "theory of mind" and describe how oxytocin seems to…
ddobbs | August 23, 2007Here's a juicy one from the Aug 24 Science.
Labs in Switzerland and the UK have independently used visual tricks to induce "out-of-body" experiences in healthy lab volunteers. At the UK lab -- the ever-productive Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London -- they seem to have combined some visuo-sensory illusions of the sort pioneered by V.S. Ramachandran with some fancy head-mounted display goggles to fool the person into seeing his or her own body elsewhere -- and then feel it when the phantom body gets tapped.
As Greg Miller's news story in Science puts it
Out-of-body experiences…
ddobbs | July 7, 2007
My article on Williams syndrome and human sociability is now on the New York Times Magazine web site, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/magazine/08sociability-t.html
This was one of the more enthrallling stories I've worked on. Williams syndrome rises from a genetic deletion of about 20-25 of our 30,000 genes, and those who have it can be pretty much counted on to be quite gregarious and social. How can a deletion amplify a trait? Is their sociability actually increased, or simply left less fettered?
As the story relates, research into Williams has addressed these questions, throwing…
ddobbs | May 4, 2007As the folks at Pure Pedantry point out, the discovery that stress precedes volume reductions in the hippocampus in PTSD is a significant insight and settles a long-running debate: Do stress and depression shrink the hippocampus (a brain area vital to learning, memory, and navigation), or does a small hippocampus make you vulnerable to stress and depresison?
We've known for a while (courtesy of research by Yvette Sheline and others) that people who've been repeatedliy or severely depressed have smaller hippocampi. But it wasn't clear which was chicken and which egg. This new study shows that…
ddobbs | April 17, 2007From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one.
As the PLOS Biology review notes,
Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21…
ddobbs | April 16, 2007Here's a pretty picture worth a look: a spinning 3-D view of populations of new neurons in a rat hippocampus. Check it out at
The Scientist : Brain Cell Video
Needs a fast connection, so take a pass if you're using dial-up.
ddobbs | February 21, 2007I'm wondering why I don't write about sex more often, now that I've done it and found it so pleasing. Scientific American just published online a piece I wrote -- brief but gratifying, I pray -- about pacing in rat sex: "Good Sex is Not a Rat Race."
The study in question seems to contradict many previous findings and much conventional wisdom about male rat (and human) preferences, namely that it's the natural way of things for males to X and run. This clever study, working the usual rat-sex research tools in some new ways, found that if a female rat is allowed to "pace" mating in a way that…
ddobbs | February 13, 2007
At this week's Mind Matters (the expert-written blog seminar I edit for sciam.com), Julie A. Markham of the University of Ililnois and Martha J. Farah of the University of Pennsylvania ponder how stimulating environments (read: better digs) and (of all things) fatherhood can build brains and make you smarter, at least if you're a marmoset.
The studies in question find that bigger, more interesting cages and fatherhood both spurred growth of dendritic spines -- the neuron's info receivers -- in marmosets. I was quite interested to read this, since two years ago I moved into a bigger, funner…
ddobbs | February 6, 2007I had half-written a post drawing attention to a fascinating new paper on consciousness ... when I discovered that Jonah Lehrer had beat me to it. I won't try to improve on his offering about this truly clever and fascinating paper, which covers some Oliver Sacks-like ground gracefully Check it out at:
The Frontal Cortex : Betting on Awareness:
ddobbs | February 6, 2007
The Decider
The Decisive
I finally got a chance to write about Patrick O'Brian's splendid Aubrey-Maturin novels. Captain Jack Aubrey, the hero of those Dickensically rich novels, provides a model of decision-making relevant to the paper reviewed in this week's Mind Matters,, the weekly blog seminar on mind and brain I edit at sciam.com. This week's topic is whether big, complicated decisions -- buying a car, going to war -- can be reliably made with little deliberation. The paper under review argues that you can. Our Mind Matters reviewers, psychologists Alex Haslam and George…
ddobbs | February 1, 2007
Mind Matters, the "blog seminar" I edit at sciam.com, this week hosts a debate (which readers can join) about a) how best to estimate the prevalence of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans and b) ultimately, how to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of war. Three researchers (Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally, UC San Francisoc psychiatrist Charles Marmar, and psychologist William Schlenger, of Abt Associates) with a long history of work in PTSD among Vietnam vets grapple with the implications of a recent study that seemed to revise sharply downward long-standing…
ddobbs | February 1, 2007I'm wondering why I don't write about sex more often, now that I've done it and found it so pleasing. Scientific American just published online a piece I wrote -- brief but gratifying, I pray -- about pacing in rat sex: "Good Sex is Not a Rat Race."
The study in question seems to contradict many previous findings and much conventional wisdom about male rat (and human) preferences, namely that it's the natural way of things for males to X and run. This clever study, working the usual rat-sex research tools in some new ways, found that if a female rat is allowed to "pace" mating in a way that…