If someone slipped you valium...

This week's New Yorker contains an article by Michael Specter that I was compelled to read at once. The topic? Placebos. In this fascinating piece, Specter offers important details such as:

In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the plecebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand-name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either.

And:

Thomas Jefferson... noted that 'one of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of coloured water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put together.'

And, perhaps my favorite, that doctors have found:

...that diazepam--more commonly known as Valium--has no discernible effect on anxiety unless a person knows he is taking it.

To read the article, see The Power of Nothing.

This is your brain on ayahuasca. Or is it?

Reporting for New Scientist, Arran Frood brings us the results of a Brazilian study that looked at the brain activity of frequent users of ayahuasca, a tea prepared from a jungle vine and traditionally used by shamans. Researchers scanned the brains of subjects as they looked at images of people or animals, as they closed their eyes and imagined the object, and as they closed their eyes and imagined the objects after a dose of ayahuasca. The results?

...researchers found that neural activity in the primary visual cortex dropped off when volunteers imagined seeing the image rather than actually viewing it.

But when the team then gave the volunteers a dose of ayahuasca and repeated the experiment, they found that the level of activity in the primary visual cortex was virtually indistinguishable when the volunteers were really viewing an image and when they were imagining it. This means visions seen have a real, neurological basis, says de Araujo – they are not made up or imagined.

Evidently, the pharmacology of ayahuasca resembles that of some more conventional drugs for treating addiction, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps this Amazon concoction will join the ranks of LSD in tomorrow's medicine cabinet.
To read the entire story, see Drug hallucinations look real in the brain

The Brain on Magnets

Sure, we all know about lie-detector tests. But wouldn't it be easier to simply make sure no one lies to begin with? Talis Bachmann's team at the University of Tartu in Estoni thinks this might be possible. After applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)--which is involved in cognitive control--the team found that patients were more likely to be truthful.

Is it true? Judge for yourself: to read more see Powerful magnets hamper our ability to lie.

Hollywood on the brain

Chris Colin brings us the story of Simon Lewis, a successful film producer who lost a "full third of his right hemisphere" after a terrifying car accident. Lewis fell into a deep coma, only to defy the odds against him by emerging from it a month later:

He would move into his parent' house that summer, 1994, but that was just the beginning of a seemingly endless medical journey. No sooner would he recuperate from one grueling surgery than he'd be back for another. The months turned to years. His recovery lasted a decade and a half.

And now? Lewis says he wants to make films again, incorporating some of the new ways he perceives the world (particularly "flat time" and "blind sight," which Colin describes in detail in his book) into his art. "He wanted to make different movies because he had a different brain inside his skull and a different way of experiencing the world," Colin writes. In Lewis' words:

Picture all the memories from your life as a photo album. Then take out all the photos and shuffle them across a table. That's my brain... It can be frustrating, but as far as making interesting connections goes, it certainly opens things up in a new way.

Will his movies be made? Only time will tell. But the story is an amazing one. To read an excerpt of the story in the Atlantic, see The Hollywood Producer Who Survived Catastrophe or buy the ebook (just 1.99) at Amazon.

The Queen is Dead: The Story of an Ancient Medicinal Tonic

After two years studying the dessicated contents of Queen Hathshepsut's beauty cream, a team of researchers at the University of Bonn have concluded that a carcinogenic substance in the flask may have poisoned her.

The queen, who was evidently obese and suffered from diabetes and liver cancer as well as eczema, ruled Egypt 3,500 years ago. The cream contained palm and nutmeg oil and fatty acids that relieve skin irritations, as well as benzopyrene, a highly carcinogenic hydrocarbon.

For the full story, as well as a grizzly photograph of the queen herself, see Queen Hatshepsut, Ancient Egyptian Leader, Might Have Accidentally Poisoned Herself: Experts.

Good old-fashioned trepanation!

Bruce Bower over at Science News reports that a new study conducted by anthropologist Efthymia Nikita of the University of Cambridge in England has found that men were drilling pieces out of each other's skulls to treat wounds or cure other ailments. Over two-thousand years ago!

Nikita, who studied three skulls that once belonged to living men who resided in what is now southwest Libya, determined that the "dime- to quarter-sized holes inside hollowed-out areas, as well as scraped-out depressions" were not from "disease, bone-chewing animals, accidental falls or intentional blows." They are, instead, evidence of surgical procedures performed thousands of years ago.

I wonder if any female skulls have the same pattern of holes and depressions, or if trepanation was just something the boys did back then.

To read the entire article, see: Ancient Saharan head cases

Spontanteous Human Combustion: It's Ablaze!

Do spontaneous human combustion events happen along some kind of geographical line? Has there been and will there be a "boom" in spontaneous human combustion cases? What is it like to combust spontaneously? These are just a few of the questions Larry E. Arnold, oft called the world's "foremost authority on the phenomenon" and author of Ablaze: The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion addresses in this two and a half hour interview available here. In addition, his book promises "hundreds of unbelievable examples of The Fire Within, culled from long-forgotten obscure medical journals and never-before-published interviews with witnesses to the impossible." Sounds great!