mindtricks

A fun article at livescience.com poses an interesting question; “What happens if we all become twice as smart?”

This is not a strange thought since human IQ has been steadily rising since measurements began. This is called the Flynn effect and social scientists are not sure what caused it, though improved nutrition, education and social complexity in the media age are all pinned as being factors in the increase.

Interestingly, not as much would change as you think, says Richard Haier, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. Although we would be able to learn faster and remember more (since our IQ’s would effectively be equivalent to that of rare crazy genius Isaac Newton) society is unlikely to suddenly turn into a futuristics utopia of like minded pacifists.

We would certainly be healthier, probably more physically attractive and less superstitious as these all correlate with increased intelligence, but the same personal defects (arrogance, anti-social behaviour, selfishness, etc.) would plague a civilisation of geniuses like they do today. Some of us would be able to devise brilliant new technological solutions to complex problems we face today, but similarly, those with nefarious purposes would be able to turn great new inventions towards destructive new ways of profit at the cost of others, or if we are really unlucky, new and apocalyptic weapons of war.

Certainly an entertaining thought. Be sure to read the article and post in the comments what you would think is most likely to change when we all have an average IQ of 200.

I’ve published a couple of free ebooks recently: Explore your blind spot shows you how to reveal the gap we all have in our visual experience of the world, and discusses what it means about consciousness that this gap is kept hidden from us most of the time. Control Your Dreams, co-written with Cathryn Bardsley and illustrated beautifully by Harriet Cameron, tells you how to have lucid dreams, those dreams where you realise you are dreaming and can take control over reality.

Both books are written as treasure hunts – travel guides, but for exploring inner space. When you start reading you will be told about the journey ahead, what you’ll need and how long it will take. Next we tell you about the treasure – some surprising or interesting feature of the mind and brain which is the core experience of the book. We tell you how to generate this experience for yourself, and the things to look out for, and what that experience might mean for our understanding of ourselves. We finish with “travellers’ tales”, which are reports from others who’ve experimented with the phenomenon and links to the scientific literature on the topic.

The core of psychology is experiences. Psychologists think about those experiences, turn them into theories, and try to settle arguments between themselves by generating new experiences – in the form of experiments. But the joy of psychological science is that everybody has access to the raw material. The books are a way of sharing that, an attempt to give away the raw material of psychological science, packaged as experiences for the reader.

The books are creative commons licensed, which means you download them, copy them, even modify them if you want to produced an improved version, and both are fully referenced so you can check up on any claims made in them. Science is naturally an open-source phenomenon, so it feels good to be doing some open source science writing.

Link: Explore Your Blindspot by Tom Stafford Link: Control Your Dreams by Tom Stafford & Cathryn Bardsley, Illustrated by Harriet Cameron

The New Atlantic has an in-depth biographical article on psychologist Abraham Maslow – one of the founders of humanistic psychology and famous for his ‘hierarchy of needs’.

Maslow is stereotypically associated with a kind of fluffy ‘love yourself’ psychology although the man himself was quite a skeptic of the mumbo jumbo that got associated with his work.

The association is not so much because of Maslow’s focus on self-actualization, a goal where we use our psychological potential to its fullest, but because of his association with the ‘human potential movement’ and the Esalen Institute.

Esalen had some quite laudable goals but ended up being a hot tub of flaky hippy therapies. If you want an idea of what we’re talking about, you perhaps won’t be surprised to learn that nude psychotherapy movement that we covered previously on Mind Hacks originated from the same place.

Maslow quickly got pissed off with half-baked people that he attracted and but sadly the stereotype stuck.

The man himself was far more complex, however, as was his remarkably profound work, and The New Atlantis article does a great job of bringing out the depth of his life and ideas. Recommended.  

Link to article ‘Abraham Maslow and the All-American Self’.

This will probably be the most amazing thing you’ll see for a while. But if you think we’re referring to an encounter with the Derrenite dynasty of Clan Brown, you’ll be sorely disappointed (or not, depends?). What you’ll see below, and we do urge you to watch, is footage of a troop of wild mountain gorillas in Uganda, marching through a tourist camp as if they own the place, sitting down for a snack next to a stunned tourist before moving on. These are our second closest living relatives after the chimpanzee, since our common ancestors with the gorillas diverged about 7 million years ago and about 5 million for chimps. We share 95-99% of the same DNA.

Now, we say wild, but these gorillas in Uganda are exposed to human tourists all year long. With only about 750 of the heavily endangered mountain gorillas left, tourism is the only way to pay for the rangers needed to protect the animals from encroaching urban interference and the witchdoctors or poachers that sell the gorilla body parts for use in “magical” potions. It was also common to eat the great apes, before conservationists were able to end this practice.

The gorillas in the video are called the Rushegura troop and consist of a harem of females (the moderate sized black apes), a ton of toddlers of various sizes and one giant male silverback (you will know him when you see him, trust us). As you’ll notice, the silverback is perhaps three-or four times the size of the females! “Why?”, a male visitor might ask in a trembling, thin voice so his 7ft tall 280lbs silverback wife won’t hear him from the couch. Well, as you suspect the males have to fight for domination of the harems. Hence evolution has favoured an ongoing arms-race between males that resulted in them growing steadily bigger. The rationale being that randomly born larger males won more fights, had more sex and hence their own male offspring also got the genes for being larger. Whilst females, not encumbered with this tiresome competitive boasting, could stay nice and small so they in theory could still catcha cab to a theatre in Britain to see Derren’s awesome Svengali show (hint, hint).

As a result, a silverback gorilla in his prime, as the specimen in the video certainly seems to be, is not only huge, but also has the estimated strength of around 10 to 20 strong human men! Don’t believe us? Look at the video and pay special attention to the mass of muscles on the silverback. These amazing animals have been observed casually snapping giant bamboo stalks, equivalent to the strength of two inch steel bars, like twigs. Imagine what it could do to your parents in law? Luckily (for your parents in law) these are rather meek non-violent creatures, and if you treat them with respect, no looking in the eyes, stay low, still and submissive, you’ll be absolutely fine as the video will show you.

What a wonderful and terrifying experience this must have been. To have those little gorillas crawl all over you, kissing your face (sublime!) whilst their dad, a massive silverback 50 times your strength (the guy is kinda feeble, OK?) is having a little rest right behind you, keeping a protective eye on his brood and you…

For a somewhat higher quality video visit the Whyevolutionistrue blog of biologist and author Jerry Coyne, who wrote an amazing book on evolution called “Why Evolution is True”.

In the video below we take a look at the beautiful and rather psychedelic world of intracellular life. These animated images show in stunning detail how molecules containing the genetic instructions that form life, DNA, fold up to form chromosomes (46 compact packages of genetic material) so the cell can divide. Cell division is of course necessary for creatures to grow or to replace older cells in bodies. More importantly we need some of those chromosomes to share our genetic material and to produce a next generation of Derren-loving hairless apes.

In total there is 6 feet (1,8 meters) of DNA in every single one of our 50 trillion or so cells. They would, if you put all of these strands of DNA together in some mad and evil experiment, reach to the sun….and back… for over four times! How’s that for some juicy facts to impress a crowd of your choosing?

You’ll also see how the DNA is split and copied from one original strand in the first place. In a rather roundabout (literally) way, you will agree.

The video is especially powerful for highlighting some of the more ‘random’ elements of our inner workings. Amino-acids and proteins move around in a cell like tiny drunken sheep, intoxicated by small atomic forces and just bump in to each other, after which which their unromantic mechanical coupling begins to start the chain reaction leading to folding, replicating and a thousand other functions. No direction, no mind, just a jittery recombination of atoms that complements each other. So stunning and enthralling, we just call it life.

Thanks to It’s Okay To Be Smart for pointing out this lovely video. Find a longer version, with more of the stunning animations below:

The Rolling Stones launched their career in a social therapeutic club, designed to help troubled youth with communication skills. The club became legendary in rock ‘n roll history but its therapeutic roots have almost been forgotten.

Eel Pie Island is a small patch on the River Thames famous for the underground club that earned a place in 60′s history for hosting the cream of jazz bands and rock n’ roll outfits.

Less well known, is the story of how the club was created as a therapeutic environment to help troubled youth.

Its place in music history has been recounted many times over the years but its therapeutic past has almost been forgotten. At the time, it seems only to have been discussed in a 1969 article published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry.

The club was created by junk shop owner and sociologist Arthur Chisnall. He was both a music fan and, what we would now call an outreach worker, concerned about disaffected youth.

As a music promoter, he got the cream of the American jazz and blues scene to play the club, which attracted punters like the recently formed Rolling Stones, who were just discovering the electric-tinged blues sound that they would later champion. They shortly became the house band.

But the idea was to create a club where kids could turn up and socialise, encouraged by the underground vibe, while the staff would encourage interaction and social communication skills.

The 1969 International Journal of Social Psychiatry article described the therapeutic approach:

How is therapy accomplished? Workers at the Club convey an accepting and non-judgmental attitude toward the members. A new member can come as frequently or infrequently as he wishes and thus regulate his attendance in accordance with his ability to accept the situation, so that the Club is minimally threatening to its participants. The Island’s somewhat rakish reputation surely contributes to its appeal for many youngsters…

Communication is so central to the Club’s therapeutic rationale that the only dimension on which members are classified by the staff is in terms of their being part of either a high-, medium-, or low-communication culture. Other forces making for therapy are conversations initiated by the staff, the music itself, vocational help, and identification with the Club’s founder.

In fact, Chisnall made a point of making sure people were matched with suitable friends inside the club, what we would now called ‘enhancing social support’, while putting members in contact with suitable support organisations and agencies if needed.

Musically, the club started out as a jazz club but its “somewhat rakish reputation” increasingly attracted London’s growing rock ‘n roll scene hosting The Rolling Stones, Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Bowie, Rod Stewart, Pink Floyd, The Who and Pink Floyd, among a host of others.

The club, and the social therapeutic experiment, closed in ’67, apparently because Chisnall couldn’t pay repairs demanded by the police, and the building was eventually destroyed in a fire in 1971.

Nowadays, Ell Pie Island is widely recognised as the father of the 60′s rock n’ roll scene but it is hardly known that it was also the father of community intervention projects that use everything from hip hop to graffiti to get troubled kids into a positive social environment.  

Link to locked ’69 article “A Social-Therapeutic Jazz Club in England” Link to BBC piece on its musical legacy. Link to book chapter on the same.

There’s a very strong likelihood that if you’re reading this you’re either:

a) a rational skeptic

b) a trojan spiritualist

c) a fan of Derren Brown

Good news then that all three will find something to enjoy in The Debunking Handbook, an Ebook that is free to download courtesy of skepticalscience.com, a website that focuses primarily on explaining what peer-reviewed science has to say about global warming.

They describe it thus:

“Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there’s no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths.

The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation.”

Feel free to go grab your copy of The Debunking Handbook and then come back here to let us know what you think. It shouldn’t take you long, it’s only seven pages long.

Souce: Lifehacker

(Thanks to DG for the scoop)

“A great advantage of mentalism magic tricks is that they can be learned quite easily with a little practice and performed almost anywhere ” – Austin Hackney —————————————————– There’s no doubt that of all the kinds of magic tricks that can be performed, the most popular and effective today is to astonish an audience with [...]

We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies.

The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away.

The Haitian explanation for how zombies are created involves the distinction between different elements of the human being – including the body, the gwobon anj (the animating principle) and the ti-bon anj, which represents something akin to agency, awareness, and memory.

In line with these beliefs is the fact that awareness and agency can be split off from the human being – and can be captured and stored in a bottle by a bòkò, a type of magician and spirit worker who can be paid to send curses or help individuals achieve their aims.

This purportedly leaves a passive easily-controlled animated body – the zombie – believed to be created to provide free labour on plantations.

Anthropologist Wade Davis claimed to have identified the ingredients of the bòkò’s zombification powder which supposedly included tetrodotoxin – a naturally occurring neurotoxin found in some animals, like the pufferfish, which can cause temporary coma-like states.

I won’t say much more about the ‘neurotoxin’ theory of zombification, not least because it was brilliantly covered by science writer Mo Costandi and I couldn’t improve on his fantastic article which will tell you everything you need to know.

On the cultural level, zombies are identified by specific characteristics – they cannot lift up their heads, have a nasal intonation, a fixed staring expression, they carry repeated purposeless actions and have limited and repetitive speech.

This means that they are easily identified by the community and Littlewood and Douyon’s study was a medical investigation into three ‘returned zombies’ – each of which was identified as a member of the family who had died and who had returned with the characteristic features.

FI was a 30-year-old woman who had died after a short illness and was buried next to the house, only for her to be recognised in a zombified state three years later by her family, wandering near to her village.

WD died at the age of 18 shortly after his “eyes turned yellow” and his body “swelled up” and was buried in a family tomb. He was identified as a zombie at a cockfight eight years after he had been buried.

MM was a young woman who also died at 18 after a short illness, but who was identified 13 years later in the town market, walking around in the characteristic detached shambling way.

While the families put their fate down to sorcery, a full medical examination was carried out by the two doctors, including the use of EEG and CT brain scans.

FI showed no neurological damage but was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia, a very withdrawn form of psychosis. WD was found to have brain damage, probably from lack of oxygen, and epilepsy, which could be treated with drugs. MM was found to a developmental learning disability, probably caused by her alcoholism when her mother was pregnant with her.

The fact that doctors gave medical explanations for people identified as zombies is, perhaps, no big surprise, but most interesting was that DNA and fingerprinting tests that showed that two of the zombies were cases of mistaken identity. They weren’t the dead relatives that the families thought they were.

The authors of the study noted that it is unlikely that there is a single explanation for all people identified as zombies but there was a hint that the ‘neurotoxin’ theory could explain some cases. Two types of ‘zombification’ powder from local bòkòs were tested, and, in line with Wade Davis’s ideas, tetrodotoxin was found.

But more probable is that most cases are mistaken identification of wandering mentally ill or neurologically impaired strangers by bereaved relatives.

They noted “People with a chronic schizophrenic illness, brain damage, or learning disability are not uncommonly met with wandering in Haiti, and they would be particularly likely to be identified as lacking volition and memory which are characteristics of a zombi.”

Interestingly, the first known photograph of a zombie, shown above, was taken by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and reproduced in her 1938 book Voodoo Gods where it notes that the subject was photographed in a psychiatric hospital, which makes more sense in light of this more recent medical examination.

It’s worth making a final point that while zombies are a particularly well-known aspect of Haitian culture, thanks to the stereotypes and Hollywood hijacking, traditional Haitian psychology and related concepts of illness are hugely fascinating topics in themselves.

If you want to lose yourself in another understanding of ourselves and the world, you could do much worse than reading the World Health Organisation’s short report ‘Culture and Mental Health in Haiti’ which is available online as a pdf. Start at the section on ‘Religion’ from page 6 if you want to get straight to the psychology.  

Link to locked case study in The Lancet. Link to Mo Costandi’s “The ethnobiology of voodoo zombification”. pdf of WHO report on ‘Culture and Mental Health in Haiti’.

The New York Times has an excellent article on the challenges faced by couples after one member survives brain injury.

Carers sometimes say that, after brain injury, their partner is emotionally unresponsive, emotionally unstable or that their ‘personality has changed’.

This can lead to a strain on the relationship that far outlasts the ‘obvious’ effects of the injury and, unfortunately, the problem is not widely recognised.

Mrs. Curtis, 60, was once drawn to her husband’s “sparkle,” she said. After the injury, he “flat-lined” emotionally, and he suffers from depression, anxiety and a lack of motivation.

Her husband sometimes makes erratic decisions, she added, like the time he decided to take a do-it-yourself approach to the plumbing at their home in Coralville, Iowa. “Not a good picture when I got home,” Mrs. Curtis said. “And you can yell at him like a little kid, but he didn’t know any better.”

Once a software programming analyst, Mr. Curtis, 57, has “a lot fewer interests” than he did before the injury, and he estimates he has lost 90 percent of his friends.

“It’s a new you,” he said, “and they just can’t cope with that.”

The NYT piece looks at some of these difficulties but also the work of rehabilitation psychologists Jeffrey Kreutzer and Emilie Godwin who are developing ways of helping couples in this situation.  

Link to NYT piece on relationships after brain injury.

An unfortunate case of a high-impact graffiti-based neurotrauma recorded this afternoon in Bogotá on the corner of Carrera 14 and Calle 26 near the Cementerio Central.  

The Boston Globe has an excellent article about supposedly culture specific mental illnesses and how they are an ongoing puzzle for psychiatry’s diagnostic manual.

These conditions are called culture-bound syndromes in the DSM but they’ve always had a bit of ‘looking at the natives’ feel about them as many syndromes that are unknown in many non-Western cultures (anorexia, for example) aren’t listed as ‘culture bound’ in any way.

The Boston Globe article reminded me of a paper just published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences by historian Ivan Crozier where he explores how koro – the fear that the genitals are fatally shrinking into the body – has been central to the definition of the ‘culture-bound syndrome’.

The history of how this fear, usually presenting as a penis shrinking anxiety and initially reported in South East Asia, became a prime example of a supposedly culture-specific mental illness, highlighting a bias at the centre of psychiatric definitions.

Penis shrinking fears have been reported from all over the world, but only certain cases tend to get defined as a ‘culture-specific syndrome’, because of our assumptions about what counts as the ‘real’ disorder.

Koro is a particularly good syndrome with which to play up the tension between psychiatric universalism on the one hand, and ethnic bias on the other. This disruption is clear when one surveys the varieties of koro. Some people (SE Asians) have koro because they belong to the “right” culture. Others do not, because they are suffering from another primary disorder (occidental sufferers), or because there is little in the way of psychiatric provision in their country (e.g., in Africa), and because there are other working explanations for dealing with penis panics (such as witchcraft).

Likewise, sometimes the material artifacts of masculinity are of crucial importance for explaining koro as a part of a culture (the penis clamps and piercings in Asia), but not in others (the pills western men can take when they are concerned about the penis size). These differences in treatment are not trivial. They point to an ethnocentrism in psychiatric conceptions of illness that is embodied in the DSM IV in the very place that is meant to address culture: the CBSs [culture-bound syndromes section].

Sadly, the Crozier’s academic article is locked behind a paywall (demonstrating a strange culture bound syndrome endemic in Western academia) but The Boston Globe article in free to access.  

Link to Boston Globe article (via @DebbieNathan2) Link to locked article on koro and culture-bound syndromes.

This year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were a fantastic trip through neuroscience and the brain – and you can now watch them online from anywhere in the world.

The Christmas Lectures are a traditional event where a leading scientist is chosen to present the latest developments in a fun and engaging way to a lecture theatre full of slightly posh kids.

They’re televised in the UK but they’ve now been made available online and you can watch all three streamed over the net.

And I really recommend you do as they’re fantastic.

They’re presented by psychologist Bruce Hood and they’re packed with excellent demonstrations that use everything from cutting edge neuroscience technology to stuff you could find in your house.

Enormously enjoyable whether your a fan or a profesional (or both).  

Link to excellent online Christmas lectures.

The American Psychiatric Association have used legal threats to force a critical blog to change its title because they didn’t like it being called ‘DSM Watch’.

The ‘DSM Watch’ website, now called ‘Dx Revision Watch‘, is one of the better websites keeping track and critiquing the upcoming changes to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5.

On January 3rd the website owner reported receiving two cease and desist letters from the APA ordering the removal of all reference to the ‘DSM5 trademark’ from the site’s domain dsm5watch.wordpress.com

You might be wandering why the APA registered DSM-5 as trademark – which is a legal device to protect against other people making profit from your good name – and why they are using it to bully critics.

Firstly, DSM Watch was a non-commercial site and so was in no danger of profiting from referencing DSM-5 in its domain name, and secondly no-one for a moment would look at the site and think it was an official APA site – in part, because despite the great content, it does not have, shall we say, the most corporate of looks.

If the APA still didn’t think the distinction was clear enough a simple request to add a message saying ‘not an official DSM5 website’ (or maybe they’d prefer ‘product’, who knows?) would suffice.

Apparently though, we can now distinguish between official and non-official DSM websites because the non-official ones are those engaged in healthy and appropriate criticism of the manual that must not be named.

However, I do hope they’re going to clamp down on the punk band DSM-5 so no-one mistakenly buys a copy of the diagnostic manual when they actually wanted a ticket to a sweaty hardcore gig.

Imagine the disappointment.  

Link to post on APA legal threats.

If you follow Derren on Twitter you may be aware by now that he has just passed the one million follower mark.

To celebrate the occasion, DB has devised an ingenious competition with the prize being a trip to The Ivy in London for dinner with Derren.

Watch the video below for full details:

 

You have until Tuesday 10th January to enter.

I’ve just written a piece for the Discover Magazine blog The Crux about a new study that used anaesthetics to “put people under” and test the limits of their conscious mind even after they’d stopped responding to the outside world.

Doing psychology experiments on people undergoing anaesthesia is not a new idea but it has always been done on people who volunteered due to undergoing genuine surgery. But this was the first study to put volunteers under anaesthesia solely as part of an experiment.

In this case, the experiment tested whether people had conscious experiences despite being unable to respond to outside stimuli – the medical definition of being unconscious.

It turns out the conscious mind keeps working way past the point where people are medically defined as unconscious.

In addition to the standard surgical way of checking unconsciousness, participants were also regularly asked to open their eyes to check when they stopped and started responding. Afterwards, each participant was questioned about their memories of the anesthesia session to see if they had conscious experiences even when seeming to be comatose. These included simple thoughts or perceptual experiences like flashes of light, to more complex experiences such as seeing or hearing the researchers, or having dream-like, out-of-body hallucinations.

It turns out that despite being rated as unresponsive and, therefore, by the current medical definition, unconscious, participants reported conscious experiences in about 60% of the sessions. This does not mean that everyone was “awake” as we normally understand it, as the extent to which the experiences reflected the reality of what was going on around the person varied, but the volunteers were clearly having conscious experiences.

Excitingly, the researchers suggest that experimental anaesthesia could be used as a ‘dimmer switch’ for the mind to find the point where no further conscious experience takes place.

Doing these studies while studying brain activity could help us understand which brain circuits are needed for the cross-over into consciousness.

More at the link below.  

Link to ‘Anesthesia May Leave Patients Conscious—and Finally Show Consciousness in the Brain’.

The Psychologist has an article on the surprising effect of seeing a digital avatar of yourself – as if looking at your body from the outside.

The piece covers a range of effects found in psychology studies, from increasing healthy behaviour to encouraging false memories, but the bit on deliberate avatar-manipulation for advertising caught my attention.

One such consequence is depicted in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story Minority Report. Specifically, there was a scene in which Tom Cruise’s character looked up at a billboard and encountered an advertisement using his own name. That marketing feat can certainly be recreated in virtual reality. We’ve demonstrated that if a participant sees his avatar wearing a certain brand of clothing, he is more likely to recall and prefer that brand.

In other words, if one observes his avatar as a product endorser (the ultimate form of targeted advertising), he is more likely to embrace the product. There is a fairly large literature in psychology on the ‘self-referencing’ effect, which demonstrates that messages that connect with the receiver’s identity tend to be more effective than generic messages (e.g. Rogers et al., 1977)

To explore the consequences of viewing one’s virtual doppelgänger, we ran a simple experiment using digitally manipulated photographs (Ahn & Bailenson, 2011). We used imaging software to place participants’ heads on people depicted in billboards using fictitious brands, for example holding up a soft drink with a brand label on it.

After the study, participants expressed better memory as well as a preference for the brand, even though it was obvious their faces had been placed in the advertisement. In other words, even though it was clearly a gimmick, using the digital self to promote a product is effective.

The article also notes that “Based on the findings from this study, the Silicon Valley company LinkedIn is featuring job advertisements that pull the photograph of the job applicant and place it in the job advertisement.”

Needless to say, I can’t wait for the next wave of ‘penis enlargement pill’ spam.  

Link to Psychologist article on doppelgänger psychology.  

Declaration of interest: I’m an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist. My new year’s resolution is to stop buying promising-looking capsules from the internet.

The British Journal of Psychiatry’s ’100 words’ series continues with a very brief guide to the DSM psychiatric manual and its ongoing revision.

DSM is an American classification system that has dominated since 1980. It is disliked by many for reducing diagnostic skills to a cold list of operational criteria, yet embraced by researchers believing that it represents the first whiff of sense in an area of primitive dogma. It has almost foundered by confusing reliability with validity but the authors seem to recognise its errors and are hoping for rebirth in its 5th revision due in May 2013. The initials do not stand for Diagnosis as a Source of Money or Diagnosis for Simple Minds but the possibility of confusion is present.

I was very pleased to see that the British Journal of Psychiatry made quite clear that the DSM is an American invention.

The original British plans, of course, were to have psychiatric diagnoses based on measuring the stiffness of one’s upper lip – an objective and reliable approach that was sadly neglected.  

Link to British Journal of Psychiatry’s DSM in 100 words.

The APA Monitor has an article on how ‘nervousness’ in 1800s America was treated by sending male intellectuals ‘out West’ for prolonged periods of cattle roping, hunting, roughriding and male bonding.

This, I suspect, sounded a great deal more innocent in the 1800s.

But nevertheless, this sort of intense deliberately masculine physical exercise was thought to be a genuine antidote to brain-exhausting intellectual life.

Among the men treated with the so-called “West Cure” were poet Walt Whitman, painter Thomas Eakins, novelist Owen Wister and future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.

Although the Rest and West cures involved wildly different therapeutic strategies, both were designed to treat the same medical condition: neurasthenia. First described by American neurologist George Beard in 1869, neurasthenia’s symptoms included depression, insomnia, anxiety and migraines, among other complaints. The malady was not just an illness, he said, but also a mark of American cultural superiority.

According to Beard, excessive nervousness was a byproduct of a highly evolved brain and nervous system. A “brain-worker” who excelled in business or the professions might experience nervous breakdowns if he overtaxed his intellect. His highly evolved wife and children could easily succumb to the same malady, particularly if they engaged in excessive study or “brain work.”

The famous neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell wrote of neuroaesthenia that, under great nervous stress, “The strong man becomes like the average woman.”

As a male psychologist who is regularly outclassed by his female colleagues I have learnt this, sadly, to be true, but not, I suspect, in the way Weir Mitchell meant.  

Link to APA Monitor article on the cowboy cure.

“So the mentalist’s first skill is to study and understand body language. ” – Austin Hackney —————————————————– There’s no doubt that the branch of performance magic known as ‘mentalism’ is undergoing something of a renaissance these days. In part that must be to do with the success of new wave mentalists such as Derren Brown [...]