It's all in the brain

In this month's Scientific American, Kent A Kiehl and Joshua W. Buckhotz report that "some of the most cold-blooded killers aren't bad" they just "suffer from a brain abnormality" (could all good and bad be just that?)

Thanks to technology that captures brain activity in real time, experts are no longer limited to examining psychopaths' aberrant behavior. We can investigate what is happening inside them as they think, make decisions and react to the world around them. And what we find is that far from being merely selfish, psychopaths suffer from a serious biological defect. Their brains process information differently from those of other people. It's as if they have a learning disability that impairs emotional development. ...

These differences show up early, as early as five years old. The good news is that once the abnormality is detected, it may be treatable with "novel forms of therapy" that "show promise."

To read the entire article, see Inside the Mind of a Psychopath

500 brains in glass jars

Hard to imagine that more than five hundred brains--cancerous brains, floating in formaldehyde and stored in glass jars, no less--could remain hidden in "various crannies" of Yale's medical school as well as the "basement of the medical school’s dorms" for over seventy years, but Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D.'s article in today's New York Times states that this is the case. And even better, "after a colossal effort to clean and organize the material", the brains are now in a room designed solely for them!

The brains were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing, a Yale professor and one of America’s first neurosurgeons. The article quotes Michael Bliss, a medical historian, who writes this of Cushing:

“Cushing became the first surgeon in history who could open what he referred to as ‘the closed box’ of the skull of living patients with a reasonable certainty that his operations would do more good than harm.”

Before Cushing's time, doctors relied on their patients for information that would lead to the site of a brain tumor. Cushing developed a test based on vision--various changes in vision caused by different tumors--to help identify tumor location. Though doctors now use MRIs to locate tumors, the article notes that "comparatively little progress has been made since Dr. Cushing’s time in actually prolonging life in brain-cancer patients." Dr. Dennis Spencer, the chairman of neurosurgery at Yale and the Harvey and Kate Cushing professor of neurosurgery, notes:

Everything we’ve done in the last 100 years has changed the progress for malignant brain tumors very little, extending life maybe eight months to two years.

To read the complete article and see a picture of the brain jars, see Inside Neurosurgery’s Rise by Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D.

Cures for Autism? or evoking Dr. Olaf?

Today's New York Times ran a guest blog by Liane Carter that detailed her efforts to find a cure for her son, diagnosed with autism. Her family tried all the standard treatments as well as the fringe ones: a gluten/casein-free diet, probiotics, cranial sacral therapy, auditory integration therapy, homeopathy. Her doctor "charged thousands of dollars," offering "one cure du jour after another, quick to take advantage of our desperation." All this led to the following Olaf-like moment:

Finally, he insisted our 4-year-old had stealth birus [KMA: a condition I cannot find mentioned online, which makes me think it's either a typo or extreme madness]. He urged us to give him a cytotoxic drug called ganciclovir then being used for AIDS patients and other severely immuno-compromised people.

“How many children have you treated with this?” I asked.

“I’m treating one patient right now,” he said.

I was relieved that the author pulled her son from this doctor's care. Science continues to evolve, and quackery remains, and the post is a great reminder of that. To read the full story, see The False Prophets of Autism.

Building a Brain?

"Twenty years from now, the author envisages the brain builder industry as being one of the world's top industries, comparable with oil, automobile, and construction."
—Hugo de Garis (1996)

Can we build a brain? Hugo de Garis thinks so. Currently a professor at Wuhan University, he is working on the "China Brain Project", a four-year project that aims to develop "an artificial brain (A-Brain)". The brain, which will consist of 15,000 interconnected neural net modules, will control "the hundreds of behaviors of an autonomous robot." de Garis promises that the technology will be fast and cheap "(e.g. $1500 for the FPGA board, $1000 for the robot, and $500 for the PC, a total of $3000)" and he hopes "that other brain building groups around the world will copy this evolutionary engineering approach."

Also interesting are de Garis's predictions for the future. According to an interview on machineslikeus.com, he summarizes the views he expresses in his book, The Artilect War:

The book is very pessimistic, unfortunately, although I hope it is at least realistic. Its basic scenario is as follows. It is predicated on the rise of the “artilect,” i.e., machines that use 21st century technologies such as 1 bit per atom storage, reversible, heatless, nano-teched, self assembling, (topological, i.e. robust) quantum computers, that will have capacities zillions of times above human levels. I foresee humanity then splitting into 2 (arguably 3) major philosophical groups, a) the Cosmists (in favor of building artilects), b) the Terrans (opposed), and c) the Cyborgists (who want to convert themselves into artilects by adding components to themselves, i.e. by becoming “cyborgs” (cybernetic organisms)).

These philosophical differences will ultimately lead to a major war, "using 21st century weapons, and hence probably billions (not millions) of people will be killed."

Still, de Garis supports continuing with the research. "If you are a strong Cosmist, you will place higher priority on the creation of godlike artilects than the survival of the human species."

To read the full interview, see Machines Like Us.

Finding truth in the brain?

Technovelgy published an interesting article about the use of lie detectors tests in India, where results from the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature (BEOS) tests are now accepted in courts of law. The case described is of a young woman, Aditi Sharma, who was accused of poisoning her former fiance in a McDonalds. She agreed to undergo the test, and:

After placing 32 electrodes on Ms. Sharma’s head, investigators said, they read aloud their version of events, speaking in the first person (“I bought arsenic”; “I met Udit at McDonald’s”), along with neutral statements like “The sky is blue,” which help the software distinguish memories from normal cognition.

For an hour, Ms. Sharma said nothing. But the relevant nooks of her brain where memories are thought to be stored buzzed when the crime was recounted, according to Mr. Joseph, the state investigator. The judge endorsed Mr. Joseph’s assertion that the scans were proof of “experiential knowledge” of having committed the murder, rather than just having heard about it.

Proof that she is guilty? The verdict is still out. The National Academy of Sciences states "Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy..."

To read the full article, see Indian Court Says Brain Scan Proves Murder.

Mesmerize your warts away...

As promised, here's some more information about hypnotism and wart removal. This study, conducted by Nicholas P. Spanos, Robert J. Stenstrom, and Joseph C. Johnston and published in 1988 in Psychosomatic Medicine, found that "subjects given hypnotic suggestion exhibited more wart regression than those given either a placebo treatment or no treatment."

Here's a bit more about the effective hypnotic treatment:

After being comfortably seated and asked to close their eyes, subjects were orally administered a 5-min hypnotic induction procedure... Following the induction procedure, and without a break in continuity, subjects were administered a suggestion for wart elimination that was 2 min in duration. The suggestion asked subjects to attend to the sensations in their target hand and informed them repeatedly that the skin around their warts was beginning to tingle and grow warm. The suggestion also informed subjects that their warts would shrink and fall off and asked them to vividly imagine their warts shrinking in size and dissolving away.

The placebo group, which I enjoyed reading about very much (particularly the bit about protective goggles), received a "cold laser treatment." The "laser" was a "metal devise with numerous dials and buttons and an opening in which subjects placed their target hand. When the 'laser' was switched on, it made a whirring sound, and a sweeping pink light could be seen in the opening. Subjects donned 'protective goggles' and placed their hand in the opening for the first of two 4-min 'laser doses.' They were told that they might experience some tingling, prickling, and warmth in their hand during the treatment but not to be alarmed at these sensations."

A third group, the control, received no treatment. At the end of the study, the subjects' remaining warts were tallied, and the researches discovered that hypnotised patients had a 41.48% reduction, "laser" patients a 22.25% reduction, and control patients a 6.39% reduction.

All subjects, recruited via posters plastered in the vicinity of the Carleton campus, were paid $15 for their participation in the study.

"The Mesmerized Mind"

Science News recently ran a wonderful article on recent work in hypnotism. Susan Gaidos reports:
"But hypnosis is more than a stage show act. For years, psychologists have used it to help patients calm preflight jitters, get a good night's sleep or chuck a cigarette habit. Hypnosis even has uses in mainstream medicine for reducing the side effects of cancer treatments and helping patients cope with pain."

But recent studies go even further and may, according to some, help lead to treatments for a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders:
"[Hypnosis] is now used as a research tool to temporarily create hallucinations, compulsions, delusions and certain types of seizures in the lab so that these phenomena can be investigated in detail."

A bit more of interest:
+ "When hypnotized people act on hypnotic suggestion, they really do see, hear, and feel differently" --color where none exists, for example. Or pain, "in the same brain areas as 'real' pain."

+ "10-15% of adults are 'highly hypnotizable'," according to David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, "meaning they can experience dramatic changes in perception with hypnosis."

Are you one of these? According to the article, it may be linked to "an ability to become deeply absorbed in activities such as reading, listening to music or daydreaming."

+ "Rigorously controlled studies have shown that hypnosis can also control blood pressure and even make warts go away." [wow--going to google scholar that one]

+ Researchers at the University of Geneva have been study "hysterical hand paralysis". Findings are published in Neuron.