History/philosophy of science

Genetics & genomics (incl behav genetics)

Journalism & media

20,000 genes a surprise? Heck, this guy knew that long ago

ddobbs — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:55:22 +0000

20,000 genes a surprise? Heck, this guy knew that long ago

John Hawks, in his paleodreams. I mean that in the best way.

John Hawks bumps into a prescient estimate of the total gene number in humans:

While doing some other research, I ran across a remarkable short paper by James Spuhler, "On the number of genes in man," printed in Science in 1948. We've been hearing for the last ten years how the low gene count in humans -- only 20,000 or so genes -- is "surprising" to scientists who had previously imagined that humans would have many more genes than this. So here's the next to the last line of Spuhler's article: On the basis of these speculations there are then some 19,890-30,420 gene loci in man. He actually estimated the total gene number in two ways. The first, based on estimates of chromosome length in Drosophila and humans, coupled with Bridges' estimate of fruit fly gene number (5000), led to an estimate of 42,000 genes in humans. This means of estimation was probably closer to those that later suggested a high gene number in humans.

I love this. The history of science is almost always richer and more variant than we imagine.

Hawks amends:

That estimate also gives the lie to the idea that geneticists always expected a very high gene count in humans. What's remarkable to me is that the entire means of estimation required no knowledge of gene sequences or DNA; the estimates required only epidemiology coupled with cytological estimates of chromosome lengths.

ï»¿More at Hawks' blog, including the linkless old-school ref:

Spuhler JN. 1948. On the number of genes in man. Science 108:279-280.

ï»¿

ddobbs Mon, 06/21/2010 - 04:55

Tags

genomics

Human Genome Project

John Hawks

That is early! I bet Larry Moran would be interested in that reference as he has collected many more early papers that predict a smaller number of genes. Some of those references are so mainstream and so well known, that stating 20,000 was a surprise is either disingenuous or hugely uninformed.

Prescient, or maybe a lucky guess? Regardless, during the first decade or so of the HGP, it was commonly reported, even by scientists "in the know", that the decoded human genome was expected to contain between 80 and 100 thousand genes. Yes, there certainly were scientists who thought otherwise, but many _were_ surprised when the "final" tally was revealed.

Very neat on estimating between 20K-30K gene loci in H. sapiens. The 30K number may turn out to be the more accurate value when also taking into account microRNA genes and all sorts of other genetic loci that fit the broader definition of a gene.

The estimate is based on 5000 genes in Drosophila, but the fruit fly genome encodes approximately 14,000. Thus, Spuhler was a bit fortunate that the estimate in D. melanogaster was off by ~3-fold. Spuhler hit upon a good or very close number by a less than accurate means.

Reading only Hawks' account and not the original paper, Spuhler's methods sound very crude (as they would almost have to be in 1948), such that he may have stumbled upon a good result via sheer chance and not any good science.
May be worth noting also that Spuhler was by training a physical anthropologist, not a biologist (or, maybe irrelevant!).

See exactly where Phineas Gage lost his mind

ddobbs — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:39:49 +0000

See exactly where Phineas Gage lost his mind

Phineas Gage enjoys an unfortunate fame in neuroscience circles: After a 5-foot iron tamping rod blew through his head one September afternoon in 1848, the once amiable and capable railroad foreman became a uncouth ne-er-do-well â and Exhibit A in how particular brain areas tended to specialize in particular tasks. (In his case, the prefrontal cortical areas that went skyward with the tamping rod proved, in retrospect, to be vital to his powers of foresight and self-control.)

I've always taken an extra level of interest in Gage because his horrific accident happened in my adopted home state of Vermont, in Cavendish, not terribly far from where I type this. I've long wanted to visit the scene of the accident. If you'd like to as well, you have the chance this weekend if you can get up to Vermont. To mark the 150th anniversary of Gage's death (which came 12 years after his accident), the Cavendish Historical Society is taking what sounds like a phenomenal two-hour walking tour that includes the accident site, the home and office of the surgeon who treated him, the boarding house where he was taken, presumably to die, and the carpenter's shop in which was built the coffin he turned out not to need.

Here's the tour description:

May 23 (Sunday): To mark the 150th anniversary of Phineas Gage's death, CHS is holding a walking tour of sites relating to his accident. Meet at the Museum, Main Street Cavendish, at 2 pm. The tour will take about two hours and will visit the accident site where Gage had the tamping rod go through his head; and the locations of the home and surgery of Dr. Harlow; the boarding house where Gage was taken and the carpentar's shop, which built the coffin that he ended up not needing. Please read more about Gage in the previous post to this blog. If you would like copies of the walking tour guide, you can pick them up at the Cavendish Town Office or the Cavendish Library. You can obtain an PDF copy by e-mailingÂ margoc@tds.net and writing "directions for Phinease Gage tour" in the subject heading.Â ï»¿

For details, check out the Cavendish History Society calendar. If you get the map (see above), you could walk it on your own someday, though you'd miss what is likely a richly informed account from the guides. (That, unfortunately, is what I'll have to do, because I've got a prior commitment that day. I have to play baseball. Tough life.)

While you're in Cavendish (which is in southeast Vermont, about 4 hours from NYC or 2.5 from Boston),Â you can also try to find the house in whichÂ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived, though, in good New England style, the locals might not tell you. Or they might simply tell you, "You can't get theah from heah."

ddobbs Thu, 05/20/2010 - 03:39

Tags

Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp

Sweet, I'll have to check it out whenever I make it to Vermont. I saw his skull at Harvard a few years ago... pretty damn cool.

Is that a death portrait of Gage that accompanies your post?

Nay -- Gage is quite alive there, though looking rather stern.

You'd look rather annoyed too if you suddenly realized that you left your prefrontal cortex at work.

this is so stupid! yall understand yall need to get a real picture of him!!! yall know they did not have colored pictures back then... duh!

I find the circumstances of his accident and his area of study to be somewhat ironic. Cheers.

Gold in the tweetstream

ddobbs — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:41:05 +0000

Gold in the tweetstream

I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.

jayrosen_nyu: "The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company." <--- Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz

dhayton: âH-Madnessâ is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/

stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards - http://bit.ly/daP9Go

vaughanbell: Empirical evidence for the extended mind hypothesis. http://is.gd/aBUQm

mocost: Footage from a 1964 experiment testing the effects of LSD on British marines http://j.mp/ayCZpw [you'll find it almost as funny as they did]

PD_Smith: "From an environmental point of view, dense cities are scalable; Thoreauâs cabin is not." David Owen http://bit.ly/9HGGvS #city

CliftonWiens: Fantastic review of @lunaticcarl's "The Lunatic Express" by @simonwinchester in WSJ: http://bit.ly/9qi0S7. Agree 100 percent!

edyong209: @dgmacarthur savages an appalling op/ed on personal genomics in the Sunday Times http://bit.ly/cwc5J5 Many twists of knife

ddobbs Wed, 03/17/2010 - 01:41

Does depression have an upside? It's complicated.

ddobbs — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:16:55 +0000

Does depression have an upside? It's complicated.

Jonah Lehrer's story on "Depression's Upside" has created quite a kerfuffle. The idea he explores â that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight â sits badly with quite a few people. It's not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle. But Jonah (who â disclosure department â is a friend; plus I write for the Times Magazine, where the piece was published) has stirred the pot with an update drawing from (among other things) a very long review paper published last year by psychiatric researchers Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson.

The story and the flap it raised has made me examine my own thinking about this notion.
I've now read the piece and much of the reaction several times and have, ah... ruminated on it quite a bit. The subject hits close in several ways. I've written quite a bit about depression and have suffered its teeth a few times.And this analytic-ruminative theory â which I'm going to call ART here, for the sake of efficiency and fun â relates strongly to many of the issues I explored in my Atlantic article, "The Orchid Child," and will explore further in The Orchid and the Dandelion.

The article struck many commenters and readers as on-target. Evolutionary types seemed to like it. People who had experienced depression seemed roughly split, some agreeing that it generates light and others saying it just throws you down a black hole. Some commenters raised sharp objections . The most thoughtful critiques came from Neurocritic (another favorite of mine, though I don't know him) and Tufts University psychiatrist Ronald Pies. Lehrer responded with grace, poise, and intelligence, both at other people's blogs and in multiple posts at his own.

Yet that hardly resolved the tension, much less the question.I've always viewed the ART model skeptically myself, at least as wielded broadly. It doesn't fully jibe with my own experience, with the experience of some depressed people I know well, or with what I've seen in depression studies. Yet I think it has some merit and legitimate insight. Examining it can shed light on what depression really is (and isn't).

It's complexicated. I'll take it in sections.
.

Muddy Ground

The term depression is so messy, muddy, and imprecise that almost any talk about the nature of depression will encounter sloppy ground. Atop that, psychiatry itself is similarly messy and confused.

By chance and rich luck, Louis Menand published a fine article pointing out this muck and confusion the same week that Lehrer's piece appeared. Menand opens by describing a hypothetical case of "situational depression" (You've been laid off and are feeling bleak and increasingly withdrawn...), then asking you to consider whether you should follow your doctor's suggestion that you start a course of antidepressants. That's just the setup, of course, for a knockdown:

However you go about making this decision [i.e., whether to take the meds], do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals.

Then he muses:

Is depression--insomnia, irritability, lack of energy, loss of libido, and so on--like a fever or like a disease? Do patients complain of these symptoms because they have contracted the neurological equivalent of an infection? Or do the accompanying mental states (thoughts that my existence is pointless, nobody loves me, etc.) have real meaning? If people feel depressed because they have a disease in their brains, then there is no reason to pay much attention to their tales of woe, and medication is the most sensible way to cure them. Peter Kramer, in "Against Depression" (2005), describes a patient who, after she recovered from depression, accused him of taking what she had said in therapy too seriously. It was the depression talking, she told him, not her.

This provides valuable context for considering the ART model. The history Menand covers reminds us that psychiatry and its terminology are sloppy â and that you court difficulty and danger when you discuss science (perhaps especially the science of the mind) without some historical perspective. Every time you zoom out your view of psychiatry and its diagnostic categories, for instance, you see terrain stretching at a scale and in corrugations that the previous, more tightly framed perspective never suggested.

This applies especially to "depression" â a term I air-quote because it's enormously imprecise abouit not just degree and duration of symptoms -- that is, whether you're sad for a few days or in couchbound despair for years -- but also about the biological and neural dynamics involved.

Lehrer notes, for instance, that some studies show that depression generates increased activity in the ruminative, problem-solving areas of the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. Ries counters that other studies show a decrease in PFC activity. Indeed, researchers have found both things.

They've found similar 180-degree differences in how recovery from depression affects PFC activity. A few years back, Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg and colleagues looked at the neural activity of depressed patients as they responded successfully to treatment â drugs in some cases, cognitive behavioral therapy in others. In both cases, PFC activity changed. But it ramped up in people who got better while on medication, and down in people who get better while undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. (I discussed this study and its implications in a profile of Mayberg I wrote a while back. My Times Magazine article on Mayberg's experimental brain surgery trial also sheds some light on depression's nature.)

How so? It took a while for Mayberg to figure it out:

âOh man,â says Mayberg. âI was stumped. For a while I had to just set it aside.â Why did the CBT patientsâ frontal activity go from high to low as they got better, rather than vice-versa?

She finally realized that the successful CBT patients were almost by definition going to show this pattern. In CBT, patients learn to recognize and change thought patterns that help depress them. An active frontal area, then, was virtually required to make CBT work. The patients who responded to CBT did so either because they were busier thinkers by nature (and therefore more amenable to CBT) or were, when scanned at the beginning of the study, in an earlier stage of depression in which their frontal areas could still rise to the task. The CBT responders entered the study already trying to think their way out of their depression. The scans showing these initial high levels of frontal activity, then, âwere pictures,â as Mayberg put it, âof the tug-of-war between the depression and their attempt to self-correct.â When their attempt succeeded, the frontal areas could relax, and the scans showed the reduced activity.

This is a major point: It's not just depression that varies tremendously; people's reactions to it, and their possible paths out of it (and, doubtless, into it), also vary tremendously. This adds to the difficulty of offering any sweeping statements or theories about depression's nature. Yet sometimes we need sweeping statements to force a broader view.

Back to ART

Which returns us to the analytic-ruminative model. As I noted, I think the ART model has limits. Yet unlike some of Jonah's critics, I think (and I regret to report that I speak from experience as well as study) that even nasty, long, potentially lethal depressive episodes can (but don't always) inspire crucial insight. Why would some episodes do so and others not? Well, the factors I can suggest include a) the nature of the depression (particularly whether it's due to situations you have the power to change) and b) whether you possess at the time the combination of cognitive chops, inclination, and social and/or professional support to generate some insight. In other words, if you're down, maybe even really down, because a particular situation is defeating you, and ... (here you can add a bunch of ifs having to do with your willingness and ability to work the problem, the quality of your therapist, the people around you, etc.) ... then you might solve a key problem or gain a key insight.

The insight might even turn an unsatisfying life into one deeply rewarding. A psychiatrist once told m, and I think he's right about this, that most people don't face a whole bunch of different problems during their lives; instead, you tend to face the same problem presenting itself in different forms. Learn to recognize and better handle the core problem (which you are always, of course, part of), and you'll cut a smoother path. And this recognition can happen even amidst of intense depression; in fact, the depression may the only thing capable of driving you to do the needed work.

In this sense, the ART model offers a crucial truth. Yet it's part of the muddle of this thing that many depressions â perhaps most but not all deadly serious depressions â destroy rather than create. Thus the depressed PFC activity; thus the anemic powers of thought, memory, and will; thus the frozen emotions, the seized cognitive powers, the sense that every road is fogged over. These depressions just smother you.

Despite all the complexity, it's that simple: Sometimes, for some people, depression ramps up constructive thinking; for other people (or at other times for the same people for whom depression sometimes brings insight), it smothers it. Did Virginia Woolf's bipolar depression bring her insight and creativity? Quite possibly. Yet in the end it drowned her.

The Orchid Angle

The question of depression generating insight leads inevitably to the much-discussed (and sometimes disputed) association between depression and creativity. Does depression, either unipolar or bipolar, generate creativity? There's some evidence it does. There are links. But what's the source of the link?

Well, depression might, as above, sometimes directly inspires introspection and insights contributing to creativity. That's a direct causal relation.

But I think that some attributing creativity to depression may, in some cases and perhaps in general, mistake association for cause â that depression is not the thing that generates creativity and insight but a byproduct of another trait that does. And that this other trait is sensitivity â and particularly the sensitivity that comes from the "sensitivity" genes I recently wrote about in the Atlantic.

The sensitivity hypothesis asserts that some gene variants presently considered "risk genes" for mental health problems in people with stressful lives are actually "sensitivity genes" that make you more sensitive to all experience. One of the genes in question is the serotonin transporter gene, or SERT gene, which helps regulate the neurotransmitter serotonin. Two of the three variants of this gene (the "short-short" or s/s version and the "short-long" or s/l versions) have been shown to put people with stressful life histories at greater risk for depression. The sensitivity or orchid hypothesis asserts that these short SERT variants don't make people more sensitive to bad experience but to all experience, bad or good. It's not a "depression gene" but a sensitivity gene. What you make of that sensitivity naturally depends on other assets or experiences you have.

If this is so, then it's possible that this sensitivity hypothesis may account (wholly or in part) for findings that "depressed people" have more insights or creativity -- only it's not necessarily the depression that generates the insight, it's the heightened sensitivity.

This comes close to being the sort of "spandrel" that Ron Pies discusses in his critique of Lehrer's article. As Pies explains, a spandel, in evo talk, is a neutral or disadvantageous trait that comes along as a byproduct (or one expression) of some larger, broader trait that is adaptive:

In architecture, a spandrel is simply the space between two arches. Molecular evolutionist Richard Lewontin and paleontologist Steven Jay Gould argued that many traits in nature are nonadaptive, and--like spandrels--are simply byproducts of other, presumably adaptive traits. For example, Gould notes that bones are made of calcite and apatite for adaptive reasons, but they are white simply because that's the color dictated by those minerals--not because "whiteness" confers an adaptive advantage.

In her upcoming book, The Pocket Therapist, Therese J. Borchard candidly observes that, "...the sensitivity that produces so much of my [emotional] pain is precisely what makes me the compassionate person I am." ... I believe that Borchard may be gesturing toward one possible mechanism by which depression is genetically conserved: not by virtue of its adaptive value, but by virtue of depression's ability to "hitchhike" along -- as a spandrel -- with a sensitive, altruistic, and compassionate nature: traits that are indeed adaptive, in many social contexts.

As Borchard wisely counsels, we should not renounce or disown the part of us that produces depression -- it is a piece of our messy, complex, and wondrous humanity. And, to be sure: ordinary sadness or grief may indeed be a good teacher. We should not rush to suppress or "medicate" what Thomas Ã Kempis called "the proper sorrows of the soul." At the same time, we should be under no illusion that severe clinical depression is a "clarifying force" that helps us navigate life's complex problems. That, in my view, is a well-intentioned but destructive myth.

I differ with Pies here. I think â I think I know â that severe clinical depression can sometimes, in some cases, serve as "'a clarifying force' that helps us navigate life's complex problems." At other times, in other cases and other people, serious depression is indeed but a dangerous byproduct â a spandrel âthat comes from a heightened sensitivity. And that sensitivity may rise, as described in my article, from gene variants such as the S/S and S/L SERT alleles.

Doubtless the tremendous variability in depression, and the wiggy variations in its association with insight, creativity, and other upsides, depends too on other variables about which we're clueless. Much murk remains

So does this get us anywhere? I think so. Some of Lehrer's critics said he'd contributed but a "sloppy and insensitive article" that insulted the depressed and did the discussion harm. I say otherwise. Given depression's immense complexity, not to mention the muddle that is psychiatry, I think we will always, as Menand put it, "lurch" about rather clumsily in our attempts to understand it.Yet even when people articulate fairly stark positions, as Jonah did in his article and Pies in his critiques (actually, because they take stark positions), these dust-ups can, if people engage them with a willingness to look deeper, think a bit, modify their positions, perhaps even ruminate a bit, produce some useful insights. The muddle can produce clarity, the noise an upside.

ddobbs Tue, 03/09/2010 - 08:16

Categories

Physical Sciences

I was following this on Jonah's blog and find the concept rather interesting. Overall, I can't say I agree with it, but I'm sure it is true for some.

As for the creativity/sensitivity issue: I've always been creative. I haven't always put this toward any actual physical goals such as painting, songwriting, writing, etc.; but when overcome by MDD (which later "blossomed" into bipolar I), I was no more creative than I ever was, yet I was producing many more works of art. What drove me to create was tied in with sensitivity in a way. Before the onset of the MDD, I had the average burdens of an average kid. When the depression began, and thereby the burdens increased, there was so much emotional turmoil, hate, disgust, hopelessness, etc, that it was impossible to keep it all in. I needed an outlet to purge the nastiness I dealt with on a daily basis. This gave me a lot more drive to physically create, rather my usual more cerebral creativity.

Another plus to creating my written works is that I can now go back and look at them with a more or less sober mind (thanks, counselors and meds!), and see how truly messed up I was. And I can recognize patterns in thought and reasoning that only made things worse. It's something to reflect upon; it helps to recognize how far I have come. In that respect, I have more hope for the future. I'm more likely to take chances in the name of success.

While this isn't what the paper addressed, and wasn't quite as much detail as I originally intended to post, the concept of the positive spin could perhaps be tenuously related...maybe...

Dear Mr. Dobbs:

As the author of the critical rejoinder to Jonah Lehrer's article, I appreciate your nuanced and thoughtful analysis. Thanks, also, for citing my article on the Psychcentral website.

I think our respective positions are not terribly far apart. Depression, as you well explain, is an extraordinarily "heterogeneous" condition, which, in turn, affects extraordinarily different "types" of individuals. I do not doubt that for some very resourceful, intrepid, and
frankly, lucky, individuals, even a severe bout of depression could serve as a "clarifying force". It would be equally true, though, to say that for a few individuals with these qualities, a massive head injury could also serve, eventually, to "clarify" certain issues for them; e.g., "I am a vulnerable, mortal creature; my life and mind are subject to misfortunes I can't control; I had better re-orient my values in life, so that I spend my remaining time doing things I really want to do..." etc.

This, of course, is a far cry from saying that major depression--more than other severe disorders--is either specifically or uniquely "adaptive." I would need to see the controlled, randomized studies showing me such a specific advantage to major depression (versus, say, dealing with Lou Gehrig's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, stroke, etc.).

I also believe there is a very practical, clinical reason why we should resist an enthusiastic embrace of the "ART" or analytical-rumination hypothesis. For severely depressed patients who, more likely than not, have significant cognitive impairment, it may do more harm than good to tell them that, in fact, they have been given a great gift that will allow them to solve their problems more efficiently. For every such patient who is perked up by such a "teaching", I believe there will be ten who will experience it as "counter-empathic"; i.e., alien to the felt experience of their suffering. Most would likely think,
"Am I doing something wrong? My brain feels like chewed bubble gum. Why am I not solving problems like the doctor said? What's wrong with me?"

Finally, in Psychiatric Times, evolutionary biology professor Jerry Coyne PhD will be presenting his own critique of the "ART", sometime within the next few weeks. I hope you will "stay tuned"!

Best regards,
Ronald Pies MD
Editor in Chief, Psychiatric Times
Professor of Psychiatry, SUNY Upstate Medical U.
and Tufts USM, Boston

Thanks, Anodyne, for writing in, and Ronald Pies, for your note as well. I think you're right: That you and I are not terribly far apart; and neither am I terribly far from where Jonah stands on this.

A couple responses to yours:

1. Your parallel (offered half tongue-in-cheek, I think, but still... ) between depression and a head injury I find prolemmatic. I think there's an elemental difference in the sort of attention sometimes brought to bear by depression and the sense of mortality and vulnerability created by a head injury. The former implicates one's own thinking, and invites one's own agency, in a way the latter does not. This isn't always so, of course, and applies to those cases that can produce useful insight, as described. But to say the focus and clarifying impetus this produces is the same as that of a person who suffers a head or other injury seems to me well off the mark. I see what you're saying; but I don't agree with it.

As to the practical reasons one should or might resist embracing the ART model: I certainly see what you mean there, and I see why therapists and psychiatrists would resist it. Yet it seems to me that to reject it altogether, and to not be open to the possibility that some patients could turn their depression into opportunities for insight, is to miss some highly valuable therapeutic possibilities. That's not to say you should encourage immersion in depression. But the pressure created by the depression can â even as you try to relieve it â be turned against core problems that cause or aggravate the sense of helplessness. Again: Not always; but sometimes, and then, sometimes crucially.

Sounds easy from here, of course, and I fully credit, believe me, the difficulty of dealing with these issues with real patients in despair and possible or even very clear danger. It may be that the most sensible response for a healthcare provider â the 'do no harm' track â is to not embrace the depression in any way but to push back hard at every front. But that's a practice and a practical decision meant to do the right thing most of the time and avoid grievous mistakes. It's a decision to make (I'm overgeneralizing) a monolithic response to a multifaceted, mysterious condition. But that a monolithic response is the most practical (if it indeed is) doesn't make the condition any less mysterious or variegated or homogeneous; it doesn't mean that sometimes you're missing something, or that depression never behaves in a different way.

Thanks again for writing, and for your thoughtful and good-spririted discussion throughout.

Thanks, David--I appreciate your rejoinder, and I'd like to clarify and sharpen the points I was trying to make. Then, I will refrain from further comment, as I'm sure I've said more than enough!

1. I was not making an ontological claim that a head injury (or Parkinson's, etc.) will produce the same "clarifying impetus" as might be the case in depression--merely that this is an empirical question to be settled by appropriate research, not resolved a priori by means of a particular ideology of "depression". Indeed, with all due respect to your particular experience, it begs the question (in the logical sense of presuming as true precisely what is in dispute) even to assert that major depression provides a "clarifying impetus" at all. (As I've acknowledged, however, it may indeed do so for a few lucky and "plucky" individuals).

2. From the clinical standpoint: Suppose a severely depressed patient were spontaneously to say to me, "You know what, Doc? I'm finding some real meaning in this depression. It's given me insight into a number of aspects of my own being, as well as helped me to work through some really complex problems that have stymied me for years."

Aside from the fact that I would wonder what on earth the patient had been smoking that day, I would certainly not try to "quash" this patient's hopeful and grateful attitude toward his or her depression.

I would probably say, "Well, I think it's absolutely terrific that you are able to find meaning and benefit in this very difficult condition you are struggling with. Are there any other ways in which your depression has helped you?"

That is the way I believe therapists can be "open" to the hypothesis put forward by Thomson and Andrews, and defended (in my view) by Mr. Lehrer. This, of course, is entirely different than "prepping" a patient, proactively, with the notion that cognitive "gifts" will soon descend upon him, as a result of a bout of major depression.

There may, nevertheless, be opportunities to help a patient explore possible "insights" gained in the course of depression, if he or she seems interested in doing so. Moreover, after a patient has recovered from a bout of severe depression, it may be appropriate to "process" the experience in terms of what might have been learned from it.

Again: I think we need much more research on this whole issue, and I hope some day to get some going! Thanks for listening, and take care.

Best regards,
Ron Pies MD

I think most of the criticism of the ART view both online and offline (including my own here) isn't focused so much on whether rumination might sometimes help you solve problems, but on whether that's a viable explanation for depression as an adaptation. Few people would argue that depression never provides any useful insights; but that's not really the critical issue. The critical issue is whether it's plausible to think that depression remains prevalent in the human population because it promotes rumination and hence problem-solving, and that's a much harder line to swallow.

For one thing, as I pointed out in my post, most of the things depressive people tend to ruminate over are things that other people don't worry about in the first place. In that sense, saying that depression is adaptive because it helps you solve problems is a bit like saying that cigarettes are adaptive because they "solve the problem" of nicotine craving. It's no good just to show that some proportion of people suffering from depression experience some rumination-induced insight that leads to a transition to a more positive state (and of course, one could question how far we should trust people's introspective evaluations anyway); one has to show that those people are actually better off than comparable people without a depressive disposition would have been. That's the part that seems difficult (for me at least) to believe. It's not that the idea that depression might be adaptive (under some circumstances) is implausible; it's just that there are many other plausible explanations for that adaptation, most of which seem to have much more going for them than ART (not least the fact that ART can't explain animal models of depression, because animals generally don't ruminate).

...the glamorizing of mental illnesses is always an appealing pop notion and especially now that we are learning so much about the brain so fast....if only...a couple of points and a few references....lehrer is a bit 2 pop 4 mi tastes, but he does tell a good story...n he has sellebrity charisma..

- the mentally ill brain's 1st defense, and it works quite well is "I'm not sick, I'm special." maybe, but it is genetically misshaped proteins and misfiring circuits that cause the trouble...
- let me recommend the two Dana Foundation panel lectures on these topics...Kay Jameison Hutchinson has star pwr as well..

finally we'll be learning much mor abt this and other brain disorders pretty soon...grossly simplifying i see it as a "reward deficit disorder"..

Thanks for mentioning my post. You raised valid points about the complexity of some of the issues, such as clinical diagnosis. But after examining the Andrews & Thomson Psych Review article again, it seems like an even bigger crock of sh*t. ART is cavalier about any distinction between sadness and severe depression. In fact, the authors explicitly dismiss voices of reason such as Lewis Wolpert who stated:

"Sadness and low levels of depression are adaptive since they lead the individual to try and make up a loss. By contrast, severe or clinical depression is not adaptive, but can be thought of as sadness having become malignant."

[Thanks to @Verilliance for pointing out the Wolpert article.]

And for a paper claiming that depression is an evolved response, they sure avoided a direct discussion of its effects on reproductive fitness. For that I recommend Is Mental Illness Good For You?

"The trouble with these theories is that natural selection doesn't care whether you are good at poetry or solving problems through prolonged rumination. Natural selection only cares how many children you have â more accurately, how many children you have who survive to breed themselves."

Finally, the idea that obtaining crucial insights from depression depends on "whether you possess at the time the combination of cognitive chops, inclination, and social and/or professional support to generate some insight" already presupposes that the individual benefits from social, financial, and intellectual advantages independent of depression. Unfortunately, the low-income working mother without health insurance can't afford the luxury of weekly therapy sessions.

Dear Mr. Dobbs,
At least one prominent evolutionary biologist is unhappy with the Analytic Rumination Hypothesis. Jerry Coyne, who is the author of the widely admired book Why Evolution is True, has posted some trenchant criticisms on his blog. I believe that they are well worth considering.
Cordially,
William Stewart

Mr. Dobbs,
Thank you for this article. I referenced it in my essay on Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . It was interesting

Jonah Lehrer on the Neuroscience of Screwing Up

ddobbs — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:38:01 +0000

Jonah Lehrer on the Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Note: The version below is altered from the original, which was near-gibberish in a few spots. Why? Because I mistakenly posted a pre-edit version that contained the raw 'transcription' from voice-recognition software I've been trying out. (I suppose it could have been a lot worse.)

Here, more or less as I meant it to appear:

Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University. Philosophers have long theorized about how science happens, but Dunbar wanted to get beyond theory. He wasn't satisfied with abstract models of the scientific method -- that seven-step process we teach schoolkids before the science fair -- or the dogmatic faith scientists place in logic and objectivity. Dunbar knew that scientists often don't think the way the textbooks say they are supposed to. He suspected that all those philosophers of science -- from Aristotle to Karl Popper -- had missed something important about what goes on in the lab. (As Richard Feynman famously quipped, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.") So Dunbar decided to launch an "in vivo" investigation, attempting to learn from the messiness of real experiments.

He ended up spending the next year staring at postdocs and test tubes: The researchers were his flock, and he was the ornithologist. Dunbar brought tape recorders into meeting rooms and loitered in the hallway; he read grant proposals and the rough drafts of papers; he peeked at notebooks, attended lab meetings, and videotaped interview after interview. He spent four years analyzing the data. "I'm not sure I appreciated what I was getting myself into," Dunbar says. "I asked for complete access, and I got it. But there was just so much to keep track of."

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense." Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn't there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.

via wired.com

This Wired story from Jonah Lehrer examines something that too often goes unexamined: The practice of science is often quite messy. This puts in on par with many other serious endeavors: You plan your work, then try to work your plan. But no matter how sound your plan, unexpected events will often force you off course -- and sometimes to different destinations altogether.

In that sense, science is much like writing. The trick in either discipline is recognizing when you should react to a diversion, roadblock, or breakdown by detouring and when you should react by choosing a different destination. This is what makes the work hard: mastering even the basic skills takes practice and study. And that merely gives you a competence that is necessary but not sufficient to do really great work and to make the best of the opportunities and possibilities before you.

I think this is why writers sometimes get upset when they hear non-writers say something like, "Oh yes, I've been meaning to write a book someday." As if writing a book requires just a bit of time and a couple of ideas. Paul Theroux, I think it was, in one of his books, describes losing patience with a doctor he met at a party and saying to him, "Oh yes, I have been meaning to write a novel one of these days when I have the time." If I remember the passage correctly -- I read this a couple of decades ago -- Theroux replied "I''ve been meaning to do a couple of lobectomies one of these days when I get the time."

Do check out the Wired piece. Along with Jonah's deft touch, you get a nice framing anecdote about interstellar noise and an introduction to Dunbar, who runs the -- gotta love this lab name -- The Laboratory for Complex Cognition and Scientific Reasoning : People

Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

ddobbs Mon, 12/21/2009 - 10:38

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Writing

Stress is an old, old companion

ddobbs — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:03:41 +0000

Stress is an old, old companion

A nice short piece on "The Prehistory of Stress" by Matt Ford at Ars Technica (newly designed site worth checking out).

I have heard people say, on multiple occasions, that they think stress is a modern, Western phenomenon. While the psychological phenomenon known as stress has only had a formal name for just over 80 years, knowing when it was first suffered by our ancestors is a daunting task. Was life really better in the past? Is stress an entirely modern phenomenon?

Using modern forensic technology and a decidedly modern understanding of biochemistry, researchers from The University of Western Ontario have taken a look at stress levels in pre-Colombian Peru; their findings are summarized in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science. They found that stress has plagued humanity for at least 1500 years. The researchers were able to get the dead to give up not only their final secrets, but an understanding of their life for a few years before they shuffled off this mortal coil.

When humans get stressed, our bodies release a chemical known as cortisol, which appears in our blood, our urine, and even our hair. Of those three, hair is only one stands the test of over 1000 years of time, and provides a short history of the last years that its owner had. By examining hair strands from 10 individuals at five different dig sites in Peru, the researchers were able to determine how stressed people were, using the levels of cortisol in segments of their hair.

The team found that the time just before the individuals passed away was a stressful one--not an overly surprising result. But the majority of the individuals had lived through stressful periods in the years leading up to their death, suggesting that stress was a regular part of life in the pre-modern period. Perhaps this can be filed under "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

This shouldn't be a surprise. Yet, like Ford, I am surprised at how many people assume that life in earlier times was less stressful. This colors our view of our typical reactions to stress -- withdrawal, aggression -- which we tend to see as anomalous and define as maladaptive. But as the orchid or sensitivity hypothesis suggests, it makes much more sense to view these reactions as adaptive in many situations and maladaptive in other situations. Their value depends on their context. Quitting school and doing a youth gang, for instance, can be a pretty adaptive move considered from a local context -- one's prospects in the immediate neighborhood and social structure -- but a lousy move considered from a broader societal context. And all sorts of behaviors that are considered maladaptive within the particular constraints and values of our culture make sense when viewed with more sensitivity to human history.

The paper, by Emily Webb and others at the University of Western Ontario, is at the Journal of Archeological Science. You can find some other write-ups here.

ddobbs Fri, 12/18/2009 - 01:03

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Thanks - really enjoyed reading about stress and not only the impact on our lives today, but also our ancestors. I always thought stress played a huge part in our history and the evidence of stress found in 1000 year old hair is quite interesting.

Why would this be surprising? My, we have a short time line we're thinking on.

Maladaptive stress would be driven by maladaptation. That would be most likely to happen under conditions that differ significantly from the ancestral state over a short period of time.

Ergo, you would expect maladaptive stress -- long term elevated cortisol levels, for example -- just as much under agricultural as industrial conditions.

It's no more natural to be a farmer than an office worker. Both'll drive you crazy -- unfortunately, returning to nomadism isn't an option, either.

How can anyone suppose that stress is an exclusively modern phenomenon?

Let's see:
War
Rape
Famine
Disease
Political oppression
Violence
Poverty

Any of these stressful, by chance? Any shortage of these in earlier centuries? I think not.

I think the (perceived) difference is the ongoing stress that many people accept as normal in their jobs especially - stress in bad situations is one thing, but stress all the time is another entirely. Of course, to see if this is actually the case, we'd need samples of hair from modern people too, and then compare the stress levels /between/ the bad-stuff peaks.

Raymond Tallis trashtalks some "Neurotrash"

ddobbs — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:03:36 +0000

Raymond Tallis trashtalks some "Neurotrash"

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the discipline of "Exp-phi" or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced "neuro-ethics", in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people's moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet's experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

via newhumanist.org.uk

Ray Tallis talks trash to neurotrash who talk too much neuro. Suggested read; good for all your neuromatter.

Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

ddobbs Thu, 11/12/2009 - 04:03

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While I agree with some parts of his critique, I split with him on two key points. First he seems to think that philosophers have some special knowledge that should make them immune to using neuroscience for faulty reasoning. The types of imaging studies he mentions use a lot of complex math and methods that have absolutely no relationship to philosopher's knowledge base. There is no reason to assume philosophers as a category of people have the ability to critically evaluate this research beyond reading the abstracts of papers.

My bigger complaint is his push-back on neuroscience in social policy. There are many ways to go overboard on this, and he lists some good examples, but there are other concrete examples where there is a current link to social policy.

Do we treat someone with frontal brain damage, such as fronto-temporal dementia or a focal stroke the same way as others? For example, what if they punch someone in the face? When to they lose the right to sign a contract?

If someone with a stroke or tumor who suddenly gets regional perceptual blindness liable if they run over a pedestrian who was in their blind-spont and keep driving? Do we take away the license of anyone who has no awareness of a regional loss of vision?

These are real social policy questions that are being grappled with and some don't have clean answers.

thanks for the pointer to the article. I agree that there is a lot of neuro-hype, but the author's conclusions seem overstated to me. I think that neuroscience can inform some social policies, education being the one of most interest to me. I work in a lab dedicated to understanding neuroplasticity, and understanding the developmental time-course and plasticity profiles of brain systems underlying attention and language seems very relevant to educational policy.

Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands

ddobbs — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:57:45 +0000

Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands

Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

The Maldives, featured in a Wired gallery of islands shot from space. A place crucial to the story I told in Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. It was in this unique archipelago that Alexander Agassiz found the evidence he felt proved beyond doubt that Darwin's theory of coral reef formation was wrong, dead wrong. It's also a singularly beautiful place, and particularly threatened by global warming.

ddobbs Fri, 11/06/2009 - 00:57

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Dear David,

I just read your orchid children Atlantic article. A professional colleague, a child psychiatrist actually, had forwarded it to me. You have managed to put truth and hope together in a most readable way. I'll share it with my psychotherapy clients, not to mention anyone in my family who's willing to deepen their understanding of themselves and their relatives!

I look forward to more of your excellent work!

Ellen Swallow MFT

Poison King, Golden Pen -- Mayor's bio of Mithradates wins National Book Award nomination

ddobbs — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:40:13 +0000

Poison King, Golden Pen -- Mayor's bio of Mithradates wins National Book Award nomination

via press.princeton.edu

I am extremely pleased to report that my friend Adrienne Mayor's riveting (if queasy-making) biography of Mitradates, "Poison King," is a finalist for the National Book Award. It's wonderful to see a skillfully executed and absorbing account of an obscure bit of history get this sort of well-deserved attention.

Congratulations, Adrienne. And to the rest of you, click above and read it now -- so when she wins, you can say you've already read it.

Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

ddobbs Wed, 10/14/2009 - 08:40

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