Psychology Research

I just found this interesting paper in the medical journal Anesthesiology on fear of imminent death or the delusion that death has actually occurred, both linked to anaesthetic intoxication. Despite our repeated explanations that she had suffered a local anesthetic-induced complication, the patient remained convinced that she had died and come back to life. This patient had been a non-practicing Christian who believed in an afterlife. She had not had any previous experience of this kind or know of others who had had. She had had no fear of death in the preoperative period. The article notes that the delusional belief that one has died has been linked to complications with the use of lidocaine, procainamide, and procaine. As with the drugs used in the Anesthesiology case study, all of these are local anaesthetics. They are just intended to numb a specific area, so the patient is not ‘put under’ with globally conscious altering substances. It’s also interesting because the delusion that one has died is also known in the psychiatric literature, usually in the context of diagnoses such as schizophrenia or after brain injury. In these cases it is known as the Cotard delusion which is usually explained , rather unsatisfactorily, as being caused by a general emotional disconnection from the world, interpreted by the patient’s faulty reasoning system as being convincing evidence that they are dead. The case studies from the anaesthesiology literature suggest that these beliefs can be triggered in other ways, although the exact process still remains a mystery. If you’re put off by academic journals, give this article a try. It’s well written, short and fascinating. Link to Anesthesiology article on death delusions.

In advance of the Boston Search Engine Meeting , Dr. Dahlgren, Cognition Technologies’ CTO and founder, was interviewed by Harry Collier of Infonortics and the interview was posted on Stephen Arnold’s  ArnoldIT.com site. It is a great interview and a cutting-edge look at the future of search as seen through the eyes of our very own Dr. Dahlgren.  In the article she discusses what she views as the three major challenges in the search field, as well as many other important facts about Semantic NLP and the Semantic Web. Check out the full article here .

I’ve just found a fascinating article in the History of Psychiatry about a type of delusion that was widely reported in the 15th to 17th centuries but rarely occurs in modern times. The reports were of patients who believed that they were made of glass and thought they might shatter if they suffered even the lightest of knocks. In some of the more unusual forms, people struck with this form of madness might even consider themselves to be an oil lamp, a drinking vessel or even trapped in glass bottle. The belief could even be specific to certain parts of the body: Reports of glass bones, arms, and legs appeared much later, but Early Modern accounts were particularly rich in allusions to glass hearts/chests, and fragile heads. Tommaso Garzoni, an Italian monk,wrote a series of character sketches of mentally-disturbed people in 1586. In one of these cameos, drawn from Galen, the fragile delusion presents as a man who thought that his body consisted of only a large head, which he protected from injury by avoiding all contact with his fellows. The delusion was reported in medical and the proto-scientific literature of the time, but also shows up in plays and literature. Reportedly, one famous sufferer was King Charles VI of France, who allegedly refused to allow people to touch him, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself. While we tend to be most interested in how new delusional themes arise in response to cultural developments, we pay much less attention about delusions which were once common but now rarely occur. This is a lovely example of a very well researched look at the history of no-longer popular delusions. It’s also worth noting that Wikipedia has a page on the delusion where someone has briefly summarised some of the main points of the article. Link to ‘Reflection of the Glass Delusion of Europe’. Link to DOI entry for same. Link to glass delusion page on Wikipedia .

You’re deadlocked. He thinks it’s your problem; you think it’s his. You’ve been going over what happened, how it started, and who started it. But you aren’t budging. So forget the past. Move on to right now. Right now you’re upset. But then, he says he is too. You feel really put out; but then, he claims he does too. Well, OK, forget right now. The point is to figure out what to do about it. You tell him that with a small gesture he could solve it. He tells you it would be far easier for you to solve it. You say he’s stubborn. He says you are. Past, present, future-you’ve covered it all, and you’re still nowhere. Is there anything left to talk about? Anything you haven’t taken into consideration? There is. And it could be decisive, though it’s no wonder you haven’t talked about it. Call it your reserves. Imagine an indicator level on your self-esteem-your dignity meter, your egometer, your self-worth gauge. Everyone has one. The needle fluctuates through the day. Get an enthusiastic e-mail from someone you respect, and it goes up. Waste fifteen minutes looking for your lost keys, and it goes down. Take a tease to heart, and it goes down. Make ‘em laugh, and it goes up. Little things, big things. Over the day, but over the years too, the readings change. You may deny you’ve got one; you may ignore it; it may be operating completely in your unconscious; but something in you monitors it. And if your reserves get low, there’s a visceral warning, a sense that you can’t really take another hit to them. In a fight, the unspoken issue may be simply that one or both of you can’t, or won’t, take any more disappointment with yourself. No way. You can’t afford it. We act as though a debate is on the presenting issue and that issue alone, as though all we’re ever doing is looking for what’s right, what’s accurate, what’s honest. But we can’t be. Below the surface of all exchanges, there are potential threats to our dignity, some of which come at very bad times. There are costs to acknowledging that we’re all monitoring our dignity meters, but there are benefits to acknowledging this too. She’s irritated about some software program your company makes. She has finally gotten through to you in tech support and doesn’t mind letting you know that she’s frustrated. This software is making her feel like a chump, and that’s the last thing she needs right now. In a way, though, she’s lucky, because she can justify her frustration without ever admitting that it’s not just the software-it’s that her reserves are low too. She doesn’t think about her reserves or yours, but just blasts you. But you, this is your first day back at work following a week of mourning after the biggest trauma in your life. You’re fragile as can be. Sure, she’s annoyed about the software, but if she knew the state of your reserves she’d be much kinder. Self-esteem reserves aren’t the only ones. There are optimism reserves too. If you’ve been through a lot, you can’t really afford more dashed expectations, more terrible news, more stories with downer endings. Friends and I are going to see a movie together and are deciding which one. There’s one I’ve been wanting to see, but it’s a little gory. My friend is squeamish, and I tease her. Why is she such a wimp? Why isn’t she brave, like me? Well, actually she’s braver than me. If I knew what she has been through, I wouldn’t ask, and I sure wouldn’t tease. Ignoring her history and the reserves she’s left with, I look braver. Heck, I’ve had it so easy, I don’t even know that trauma can thoroughly satiate one’s appetite for downers. She suggests that we go see some Bollywood import. I scoff at Bollywood movies with their supersaccharine endings. How can people go for such hokey crap? I’m a sophisticate. I want to see movies that deliver the harsh truths. Yeah, well, if I dealt with harsh truths all day like much of Bollywood’s developing-world audiences, maybe I wouldn’t have as much of an unrequited appetite for harsh truths. I’d want an escape. As it is, ignoring our respective reserves, I escape into a sense that I’m the one brave enough to stand harsh truths. Religion too. I’m so over such pie-in-the-sky malarkey. God the merciful, happy endings-I’m way too realistic and tough to believe in that stuff, right? Those who buy into religion must be real wimps, so in need of comfort that they’ll allow themselves to be suckered into believing stories that make no sense. Again, this is true only if I compare myself to believers out of context. If my life were anything like the life many believers suffer through, I’d crave hope the way they do. Ignoring reserves, I’m tougher. Factoring in reserves, I’m weaker. Reserves are overlooked and yet are often decisive in the choices we make and the fights we fight. Why don’t we factor them in more? The short answer is that they’re very hard to factor in accurately. The long answer, in another article. © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

A new paper in Bioinformatics describes an efficient compression algorithm that allows an individual’s complete genome sequence to be compressed down to a vanishingly small amount of data – just 4 megabytes (MB). The paper takes a similar approach to the process I described in a post back in June last year (sheesh, if only I’d thought to write that up as a paper instead!). I estimated using that approach that the genome could be shrunk down to just 20 MB – compared to about 1.5 GB if you stored the entire sequence as a flat text file – with even further compression if you took advantage of databases of genetic variation like dbSNP . The basis of this compression is the use of a universal reference sequence . Each individual will differ at only a minority of sites (about 0.1%) from this reference, so you can save huge amounts of space simply by not storing the vast majority of the bases where their sequence is the same , and instead just creating a compressed list of the differences. The authors of this paper add some further refinements to this approach that I hadn’t considered, such as taking advantage of the repetitive nature of the human genome to further compress the sequence of insertions (i.e. areas of the genome that are present in the individual but not in the reference sequence). It’s worth noting, however, that the benefit of this tactic will erode over time as the reference sequence becomes steadily more complete, and eventually becomes a montage containing all of the unique sequence found in common insertion variants in the population as a whole. (Then most variations will be deletions relative to the reference rather than insertions, and deletions take up a lot less data.) While all this is very impressive, making such a heroic effort to compress the genome is probably a little excessive given how rapidly digital storage space is growing. From a personal genome point of view, most of us already carry gigabytes of digital storage on our person most of the time, so shrinking sequences down to 4 MB (which comes at the cost of adding to the time required to access the data in that sequence) is probably unnecessary – less stringent compression would probably be fine in most cases. However, I suppose that extreme compression may be useful for organisations that intend to archive extremely large numbers of complete genome sequences (assuming that sequencing costs continue to drop faster than digital storage costs). And of course there’s the whole issue of the need to store sequence quality data. The system in the article works fine for a complete, perfectly accurate genome sequence, but right now no sequencing platform is capable of generating such a sequence – far from it, in fact. It’s likely that for the foreseeable future personal genome sequences will contain a mixture of both high- and low-quality sequence, and it will thus be useful to keep them attached to information on the confidence of each called base. That will add at least somewhat to the size of the storage space required. Still, I imagine this paper was designed as more of an intellectual than a practical exercise. I look forward to the inevitable Netflix Prize -style arms race as competing genome enthusiasts struggle to squeeze out even more extraneous kilobytes over the next few years. Subscribe to Genetic Future . S. Christley, Y. Lu, C. Li, X. Xie (2008). Human genomes as email attachments Bioinformatics, 25 (2), 274-275 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn582 Read the comments on this post…

I caught this article in O magazine by fellow ScienceBlogger, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish . The article isn’t bad. It is about why people have trouble overcoming unproductive habits like trouble exercising.  But I want to correct something she says that is inaccurate. Dopamine has a primary role in the signaling reward, and this is a point made in her article. But she also says : Dopamine teaches your brain what you want, then drives you to get it, regardless of what’s good for you. It does this in two steps. First you experience something that gives you pleasure (say, McDonald’s french fries), which causes a dopamine surge. Some of that dopamine travels to the area of your brain where memories are formed and creates a memory connecting those fries with getting a reward. At that point, in sciencespeak, the fries have become “salient.” And when you’re exposed to something that’s salient, you may think, “That’s bad for me, I shouldn’t,” but your brain registers, “Dopamine jackpot!” Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

Time magazine has an interesting piece on borderline personality disorder ( BPD ), a sometimes stigmatised diagnosis that implies the patient has unstable impulsive emotional reactions and tumultuous relationships. In contrast to popular perception, the ‘borderline’ part doesn’t imply the condition is between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ but that the patient is on the borderline between a psychotic and non-psychotic disorder, as low-level distortions of perception (fleeting hallucinated voices for example) and magical or paranoid thinking are not uncommon. The stigma of the diagnosis comes from the fact that people with the label are widely considered by mental health professionals to be ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’. The fact that self-harm is common in this group often leads to informal negative labels indicating that the patient is a ‘cutter’ or ‘manipulative’. This has been borne out by various studies. Two studies have found that the label of personality disorder is associated with staff perceiving the person as less deserving of care, more difficult, manipulative, attention-seeking, annoying, and more in control of their suicidal urges and debts – even when everything else about them is the same. A study specifically with psychiatric nurses found that they were more likely to offer belittling or contradicting responses to statements from patients with the diagnosis. Borderline is, perhaps, one of the mythologised conditions in psychiatry. The fact that many mental health professionals believe that the condition is ‘lifelong’ and ‘untreatable’ is contradicted by studies that have found that the majority of people who have the diagnosis improve drastically. The most comprehensive study has found that 75% of patients with BPD no longer qualify for the diagnosis after six years. The article also discusses one of the most promising new treatments – a type of psychotherapy called dialectical behaviour therapy ( DBT ) – that has been found in early trials to improve the emotional tolerance, self-control and day-to-day functioning of patients with BPD. It was invented by psychologist Marsha Linehan (who according to the article, used to be a nun), based in part on the Buddhist techniques of mindfulness and emotion regulation. The Time piece is a little overly-dramatic in places, but is generally well-written and avoids the usual clichés associated with BPD and is well worth a look. Link to Time on ‘The Mystery of Borderline Personality Disorder’.

[ This article was originally posted in February, 2007 ] The setting was an integrated suburban middle school: nearly evenly divided between black and white students. As is the case in many schools, white students outperformed black students both in grades and test scores. But how much of this difference is attributable to real differences in ability? After all, black kids grow up “knowing” that white kids do better in school. Perhaps this was just an example of kids living down to expectations. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

We are excited to announce that we have put up a new demo site that allows users to search the Gospels of the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John).   http://Gospels.Cognition.com   or from our Home Page at www.Cognition.com .   As you may know,  Biblical  text  varies by the translation used,   and  the Bible uses  extensive  metaphorical language to express concepts.     However, even with all of these idiosyncrasies, w e think Cognition’s Semantic NLP does a pretty good job of understanding  the content , as well as providing answers to questions and references for Biblical phrases and other queries. We have worked  very  hard to show companies interested in semantically – enabling their technologies that Cognition’s technology understands language and  concept  nuance.   Try out  our latest demonstration utilizing the Gospels,  and let us know what you think.   Click on a few sample queries or do your own, then check out the results.   Be sure to look at the “Meaning Box” on the right side of the results page to see how well we understood what you were searching for. From all of us at Cognition, have a great  H oliday  S eason and a fantastic New Year!

Several weeks ago, I and a group of colleagues from the University of Portsmouth (Dave Martill, Robert Loveridge and Richard Hing) set off on a trip to the Cretaceous exposures of Morocco. We were to be joined by Nizar Ibrahim from University College Dublin – our team leader – and by Samir Zouhri and Lahssen Baidder from the University of Casablanca. Our primary aim was to discover Cretaceous dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other fossil reptiles, but we were also interested in studying the region’s geology, and to learn about the sedimentology, palaeoenvironment and taphonomic setting of the rocks that yielded the animals, particularly those of the famous Kem Kem Formation, source of Deltadromeus and Carcharodontosaurus . Morocco is an amazing country, and we experienced most of its extremes, from deep snow and blizzards in the Atlas Mountains to the aridity, heat and immense sand dunes of the Sahara. We experienced a day of sandstorms, crossed several rivers in flood, and saw the desert come to life after rain. The nights were usually clear and cold. Everywhere we went we were treated to the tremendous hospitality of the Moroccan people, whether they lived in the big, bustling cities likes Marrakesh or Casablanca, or in the small, rural villages in the south. For me (and for some other members of the team, particularly Richard), this was also the chance to see a lot of amazing African wildlife for the first time. I’m pleased to report that we had the most extraordinary luck, eventually seeing most (though not all) of the creatures I hoped we might. If you’re reading this article (and those that will follow) in the hope of hearing loads of stuff about rebbachisaurs, noasaurs and carcharodontosaurs, you’re going to be somewhat disappointed I’m afraid. If you like passerines and waders however: woo-hoo, jackpot! Unless stated otherwise, the photos were taken by Bob – thanks Bob… Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…