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Showing posts with label discontinuity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discontinuity. Show all posts
Sunday, 14 October 2007
Physiology/psychology and the brain
From the end of July 2008 and through much of August ITV Channel 5 television in the UK showed a series of programmes, each showing about 4 people who had suffered some change in brain functioning through things such as accident, stroke, illness, being struck by lightning. I only saw the last few but pasted below is text from the Channel 5 website for the first episode.
The last episode was about OCD - Obsessional Compulsive Disorder. A moving section was about two men, one in the US and one in England, who each suffered a stroke after which they became compulsive painters of pictures. Each felt very alone but it was arranged for them to meet, it meant so much to them and it seemed like they were brothers and no longer alone. Another man became a compulsive piano player in middle life after (I think) being struck by lightning. None of these people had any inclination to these things beforehand.
Doctors working in the field described human behaviour as a mixture of activity and inhibition. If something happens to prevent the usual inhibitory processes, there is then a perpetual need to perform some activity or behave in a certain way with nothing to intervene. It may be possible to use some form of cognitive exercise to recognise better when a situation is likely arising. Some people manage to adapt to their 'new self' to some extent but it does seem clear there has been a fundamental change from the 'old self'. Some of those affected manage to work around it for themselves, or with expert help or support from friends and family.
I'll just mention Alzheimers Disease here. One of my uncles appears to have developed this at around age 45 and it can happen at any age. For the last few months at work he went in and fiddled with his pen. He was pretty clever and could still write a brilliant letter - but only when 'in the mood' for it. The rest of the time he just sat around, sometimes in mental hospitals and sometimes at home.
Hopefully one day there will be medication that is more helpful, and I believe breakthroughs are being made for this and other illnesses previously thought hopeless. For most families this is devastating and some people get by better than others. It is as if the soul has gone, leaving the body. With some illnesses it can seem as though the body or mind has been taken over, destroying relationships as well.
Some of the books on the Books section deal with this subject. Sometimes people's lives and personalities change dramatically with devastating effects for them and those around them. Dorothy Otnow Lewis in 'Guilty by Reason of Insanity' details her work with a colleague that physical examination of people who carry out murder or violent crime often shows they have suffered significant relevant brain trauma. (Note: See 'Battle for the Mind' article later in the Blog on some work by William Sargant about how certain conditions, including whether someone has had food or drink, can have a significant effect on their mental condition, actions or memory.)
Work by Dorothy Otnow Lewis and her colleague also looks at the phenomenon of different personalities operating within the same individual and, in some States in the US, filmed episodes of personality 'switching' goes towards mitigating some of the sentence. The theory behind this is that the individual cannot be held responsible for certain periods in their lives when another personality part was uppermost to the exclusion of the 'real person' in court.
I think this has implications for all of us and takes me back to a point I made earlier about profiling. Obviously profiling can be very relevant and useful, the idea that certain types of personality or some experiences affect us so that perhaps much later on we carry out an extreme act. When we watch CSI or 'Criminal Minds' we see the loose ends being tied up in a meaningful way, like a children's story. But what if we can't see that and there is no apparent sense? Does that make it senseless? There's a lack of continuity or an incongruity - in our minds - but maybe there is not in the mind of the person affected and it makes good sense to them. Can we necessarily hold them 'responsible'? Would we be, if we could only see all the reasons for something we cannot explain?
We may think things like this only happen if someone is on certain medication or has taken hallucinatory or other drugs or just alcohol. People working with those who have suffered extreme psychological trauma in their developing years report this also has physical effects on parts of the brain with far-reaching consequences which these days can show on an MRI scan.
So we can't rule out brain trauma whether we know what actually happened or not. Nor can we rule out psychological trauma or PTSD. Nor can we rule out behaviour which we may see no valid reason for - because it may be that we literally just cannot see it.
- - - - - - -
'Fiddles, Cheats & Scams'
ITV series of 3 programmes August/September 2008
Article from 'The Guardian' Monday January 19 2004:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2004/jan/19/insurance.business
Insurer introduces psychological tests to prevent fraud
Insurance giant AIG has become the latest group to introduce psychological testing in a bid to cut down on fraudulent claims, it emerged today.
The US group, which operates in 130 countries, is piloting the system on motor and travel insurance claims that it believes may be fraudulent.
It has employed Absolute Customer Management, which uses an interview technique developed by criminal psychologists in the US and used in Holland by psychologists working with children, to look into any suspicious claims.
Staff at Absolute ask claimants to talk them through the claim, analysing the language they use, the level of detail they give and the emotions they display.
The group's centre in East Grinstead, West Sussex, looks into claims for 15 insurers and banks, including Fortis and esure. It handles around 400 claims a month with a collective value of £1.5m, and estimates that 30% of the claims it looks into are potentially fraudulent.
An AIG spokeswoman said: "We are convinced that the vast majority of our policyholders are honest. We are evaluating this new method on less than 1% of the claims we receive."
Car insurer Admiral recently said the use of lie detectors had led to a quarter of policyholders withdrawing claims over vehicle theft.
Britain's biggest mortgage lender, HBOS, uses voice stress analysis technology to try to detect if people are lying when lodging claims under household insurance, while Highway Insurance a syndicate of Lloyds of London, has been using it to detect fraud on motor insurance claims for more than a year.
The Association of British Insurers estimates that fraud on motor and household insurance costs the industry more than £1bn a year.- - - - - - -
And taking things even further!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/nov/20/neuroscience.science
'The brain can't lie'
Brain scans can reveal how you think and feel, and even how you might behave. No wonder the CIA and big business are interested.
By Ian Sample and David Adam
The Guardian
Thursday November 20 2003
Earlier this year, a group of American students volunteered their brains for a cutting edge neuroscience project at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The research used a technique that could watch their brains at work as they made decisions. At first glance, this seems nothing extraordinary: brain-imaging tools have been used routinely for years to assess damage caused by stroke, to hunt for brain tumours, and even identify the grey matter associated with language, love and memories. But this study was different. As each volunteer took their turn to slide into the coffin-like cylinder of the scanner, sticky fluids were squirted into their mouths. As unlikely as it sounds, the students were using multimillion pound medical equipment to take the Pepsi challenge.
Read Montague, the neuroscientist behind the Baylor experiment, is not alone in pushing the boundaries of neuroscience beyond the clinical. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have used brain-imaging equipment to try to reveal our innermost thoughts and feelings in less conventional "social neuroscience" experiments. As well as brand loyalty and consumer choice, neuroscientists are probing violent tendencies, moral reasoning, feelings of love and trust, and notions of justice. Just this week, researchers claimed to have used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain activity associated with racial prejudice.
While standard MRI machines like those still found in many hospitals take a snapshot of the brain, functional MRI is newer and more powerful because it takes lots of these snapshots one after the other, revealing how thoughts unfold over time. But the trend for using fMRI to probe social and behavioural issues is prompting some scientists to ask big questions about where this may all lead. Could it only be a matter of time before neuroscientists have techniques that can reveal secrets we would rather keep tucked under our skulls? According to some leading scientists, this isn't a paranoid over-reaction. "The CIA has been interested in fMRI for years as a means of doing lie-detection tests," says Bob Turner, an fMRI expert at University College London. After all, he says: "The brain can't lie."
As scientists unravel the links between how the brain looks and how it functions, some believe we will also be able to use images of the brain to see how people will behave. "There's no scientific distinction between prediction and understanding how the brain works," says Stephen Smith, associate director of the Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain at Oxford University.
The suggestion that brain scans could reveal not just our future health, but the intricacies of our personalities and how we might behave in a given situation, is unsettling enough to some scientists that they want legislation to stop brain-scan records falling into the wrong hands. "We're starting to get detailed information from these brain-scan experiments and soon people are going to be able to use it to predict an individual's behaviour," says Paul Glimcher at the Centre for Neuroscience at New York University. "That information has got to be proprietary to the individual."
The explosion in social neuroscience has been driven by the tumbling cost of scanning equipment. Brain scans used to be the preserve of medical and clinical experiments, because they relied on complex, expensive technology such as positron emission tomography (PET), which was only available in a handful of places. PET scanners, which rely on radioactive tracer materials, cost about £3m to buy and a single scan can cost as much as £2,000. In contrast, a new fMRI machine costs about £1.5m, and each scan works out at about £400.
The fMRI machines are essentially giant, powerful magnets that are used to detect the tiny magnetic fields carried by the hydrogen atoms in water (or blood). They allow a very detailed 3D map of blood flow to be built up, and in the head, blood flow means busy neurons. Studying which regions of the brain need the most blood tells scientists where the most thinking is going on. (The original MRI technique is identical to that used by chemists called nuclear magnetic resonance but the name was changed as it was thought nobody would want to be scanned by a machine with "nuclear" in its title).
As the scanners shifted from being an expensive piece of kit for specialist neuroscientists to a practical tool for anyone with the will to work it, the scientific questions the technique was used to investigate snowballed.
Three years ago, scientists at University College London used fMRI to investigate the essence of love. They recruited people who confessed to being hopelessly in love with their partners and showed them a series of photographs of people they knew, one of which was their partner. Although brain activity was different in each individual, the researchers found that in every case, four specific regions of the brain lit up each time they saw the one they loved. The researchers announced that they had discovered the brain's common denominator of romantic love.
A year later, Joshua Greene and colleagues at Princeton University in New Jersey studied how people solved moral dilemmas. In one test, volunteers were scanned while they were asked whether they would push a person in front of a speeding train if it meant saving the lives of five others. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the question caused a flurry of activity in parts of the brain linked with emotion, leading the researchers to conclude that such moral quandaries may not be solved purely by logical reasoning, but also by emotional reactions.
The technique has also been used to delve into the murky question of how we judge people. Last year, Ray Dolan's team at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London used fMRI to see how people judged the trustworthiness of strangers. Volunteers were shown a series of faces and asked to judge whether the person was trustworthy. The researchers found that a region of the brain called the amygdala and two other parts of the brain flickered more intensely when people were shown the faces of people they thought would not be trustworthy.
But according to some scientists, such studies are the tip of the iceberg. The better fMRI systems become, and the more adept scientists get at extracting information from them, the more they will be able to piece together the neural circuits that make us who we are.
One emerging field is that of "neuro-economics". At the Center for Neuro-economics at Claremont Graduate University in California, Paul Zak is using fMRI to study how people assign value to certain products and make choices about what they buy. "If I ask you why you made a certain decision, you might not really be sure," he says. "But what if I can look directly into your brain and see how you reached that decision? That's what we want to be able to do."
Slowly, he says, researchers are homing in on the neural circuits that are activated when we make decisions - our likes and dislikes or, for example, how much different people value cigarettes over other items. Know that, and you can start feeding the data into policies such as how you tax products, says Zak. "If you know how much people value something, you can work out at what point a price hike will stop people buying it," he says.
Zak says fMRI stands to make a big impact in what has been dubbed "neuro-marketing". As an example of how fMRI might be used, Zak proposes a company that wants to increase its sales of milk. One way it might is to gather a group of people who like milk and scan them as they drink a glass. Some of the regions of the brain that buzz with activity might be triggered by any drink, but others may be triggered only by milk. Find other stimuli that trigger these regions of the brain and it could help you work out what it is that makes milk enjoyable, says Zak. Suppose objects from your childhood made those regions of your brain flicker. It might be that milk was evoking a sense of nostalgia, reminding you of when you got milk at school.
"If it turned out that milk was pleasurable to drink because it evokes memories of your childhood, you could market it as 'good when you were a kid, great when you're an adult'," he says. It's just an idea, and we're not there yet, but Zak says this is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. "A couple of years ago there was a lot of hostility to this kind of research, but now people are realising there's potential in it. Of course there will be a lot of crappy studies, but done properly, it allows us to get answers to questions we could never get before."
At Glimcher's lab in New York, progress is being made into understanding how the brain allow us to make certain decisions. Using fMRI scans and another technique that measures the activity of single neurons, Glimcher has recreated in a computer the neural programs that monkeys use to make decisions in a simple financial game. "Their behaviour is quite erratic and very similar to that of humans, but the program predicts what they will do to about 95% accuracy. It's spooky," he says. Ultimately, says Glimcher, neuroscientists should be able to use techniques like this to work out what a person will do in a specific situation, such as what he or she might buy when they walk into a shop.
At least one company, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, in Atlanta, has been set up to exploit brain scans to inform marketing strategies. Instead of using focus groups, it is trying to use scans to tell companies what people think of their products and commercials.
Not everyone is convinced of the approach though. Donald Kennedy, the Stanford University-based editor of the journal Science and one of America's most eminent scientists, says: "You could just ask people what they think."
While Glimcher concedes that using brain scans to predict behaviour is a long way off, the progress is such that we should think about the implications, he says. "It raises serious philosophical questions, because it reduces us to a machine, but there's also a huge moral issue." Who should be allowed access to our brain scans, if they can reveal so much about us, he asks. "Within 10 years, we will need legislation that protects brain-scan information in the same way genetic information is protected," he says.
If using brain scans to predict specific behaviour is not on the cards, using them to judge if we will suffer from mental disease later in life is. Studies have shown that fMRI scans can be used to reveal early signs of multiple sclerosis and even go some way to predicting who might be most susceptible to dementias such as Alzheimer's. "For severe mental illness and dementias it is a serious proposition," says Sean Spence, a psychiatry researcher at Sheffield University. "There are changes in their brain before they begin to lose their memory. It's quite conceivable people could use that."
Stanford's Kennedy says it is the potential to use scans to predict people's health that is a concern. "I'm worried about fMRI scans being preserved after they have been taken," he says. "There's a push to prevent genetic information being used by companies for adverse selection, and at least equal protection should be given to brain scan data."
Glimcher says legislation banning access to people's brain scans should be drawn up to keep the data private before it's too late. "It's only a matter of time before the insurance companies come calling," he says. "It is going to happen and it's a big issue. It has to be dealt with soon."
See the full article at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/nov/20/neuroscience.science
- - - - - - -
From Channel Five website seach for 'My Strange Brain'
You may also like...
. . . . .Link added here for easy reference 12 Sept 2008:www.spring.org.uk Jeremy Dean's Psyblog site about 'understanding how our minds work and why we think and act the way we do'.
Information & links to articles appearing in psychology journals:
social psychology, memory, non-verbal behaviour, emotions, neuroscience, persuasion, relationships. Other Psychology Blogs are listed on the site starting HERE.
Psyblog updates can be emailed to you.. . . . .
The last episode was about OCD - Obsessional Compulsive Disorder. A moving section was about two men, one in the US and one in England, who each suffered a stroke after which they became compulsive painters of pictures. Each felt very alone but it was arranged for them to meet, it meant so much to them and it seemed like they were brothers and no longer alone. Another man became a compulsive piano player in middle life after (I think) being struck by lightning. None of these people had any inclination to these things beforehand.
Doctors working in the field described human behaviour as a mixture of activity and inhibition. If something happens to prevent the usual inhibitory processes, there is then a perpetual need to perform some activity or behave in a certain way with nothing to intervene. It may be possible to use some form of cognitive exercise to recognise better when a situation is likely arising. Some people manage to adapt to their 'new self' to some extent but it does seem clear there has been a fundamental change from the 'old self'. Some of those affected manage to work around it for themselves, or with expert help or support from friends and family.
I'll just mention Alzheimers Disease here. One of my uncles appears to have developed this at around age 45 and it can happen at any age. For the last few months at work he went in and fiddled with his pen. He was pretty clever and could still write a brilliant letter - but only when 'in the mood' for it. The rest of the time he just sat around, sometimes in mental hospitals and sometimes at home.
Hopefully one day there will be medication that is more helpful, and I believe breakthroughs are being made for this and other illnesses previously thought hopeless. For most families this is devastating and some people get by better than others. It is as if the soul has gone, leaving the body. With some illnesses it can seem as though the body or mind has been taken over, destroying relationships as well.
Some of the books on the Books section deal with this subject. Sometimes people's lives and personalities change dramatically with devastating effects for them and those around them. Dorothy Otnow Lewis in 'Guilty by Reason of Insanity' details her work with a colleague that physical examination of people who carry out murder or violent crime often shows they have suffered significant relevant brain trauma. (Note: See 'Battle for the Mind' article later in the Blog on some work by William Sargant about how certain conditions, including whether someone has had food or drink, can have a significant effect on their mental condition, actions or memory.)
Work by Dorothy Otnow Lewis and her colleague also looks at the phenomenon of different personalities operating within the same individual and, in some States in the US, filmed episodes of personality 'switching' goes towards mitigating some of the sentence. The theory behind this is that the individual cannot be held responsible for certain periods in their lives when another personality part was uppermost to the exclusion of the 'real person' in court.
I think this has implications for all of us and takes me back to a point I made earlier about profiling. Obviously profiling can be very relevant and useful, the idea that certain types of personality or some experiences affect us so that perhaps much later on we carry out an extreme act. When we watch CSI or 'Criminal Minds' we see the loose ends being tied up in a meaningful way, like a children's story. But what if we can't see that and there is no apparent sense? Does that make it senseless? There's a lack of continuity or an incongruity - in our minds - but maybe there is not in the mind of the person affected and it makes good sense to them. Can we necessarily hold them 'responsible'? Would we be, if we could only see all the reasons for something we cannot explain?
We may think things like this only happen if someone is on certain medication or has taken hallucinatory or other drugs or just alcohol. People working with those who have suffered extreme psychological trauma in their developing years report this also has physical effects on parts of the brain with far-reaching consequences which these days can show on an MRI scan.
So we can't rule out brain trauma whether we know what actually happened or not. Nor can we rule out psychological trauma or PTSD. Nor can we rule out behaviour which we may see no valid reason for - because it may be that we literally just cannot see it.
- - - - - - -
'Fiddles, Cheats & Scams'
ITV series of 3 programmes August/September 2008
Article from 'The Guardian' Monday January 19 2004:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2004/jan/19/insurance.business
Insurer introduces psychological tests to prevent fraud
Insurance giant AIG has become the latest group to introduce psychological testing in a bid to cut down on fraudulent claims, it emerged today.
The US group, which operates in 130 countries, is piloting the system on motor and travel insurance claims that it believes may be fraudulent.
It has employed Absolute Customer Management, which uses an interview technique developed by criminal psychologists in the US and used in Holland by psychologists working with children, to look into any suspicious claims.
Staff at Absolute ask claimants to talk them through the claim, analysing the language they use, the level of detail they give and the emotions they display.
The group's centre in East Grinstead, West Sussex, looks into claims for 15 insurers and banks, including Fortis and esure. It handles around 400 claims a month with a collective value of £1.5m, and estimates that 30% of the claims it looks into are potentially fraudulent.
An AIG spokeswoman said: "We are convinced that the vast majority of our policyholders are honest. We are evaluating this new method on less than 1% of the claims we receive."
Car insurer Admiral recently said the use of lie detectors had led to a quarter of policyholders withdrawing claims over vehicle theft.
Britain's biggest mortgage lender, HBOS, uses voice stress analysis technology to try to detect if people are lying when lodging claims under household insurance, while Highway Insurance a syndicate of Lloyds of London, has been using it to detect fraud on motor insurance claims for more than a year.
The Association of British Insurers estimates that fraud on motor and household insurance costs the industry more than £1bn a year.- - - - - - -
And taking things even further!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/nov/20/neuroscience.science
'The brain can't lie'
Brain scans can reveal how you think and feel, and even how you might behave. No wonder the CIA and big business are interested.
By Ian Sample and David Adam
The Guardian
Thursday November 20 2003
Earlier this year, a group of American students volunteered their brains for a cutting edge neuroscience project at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The research used a technique that could watch their brains at work as they made decisions. At first glance, this seems nothing extraordinary: brain-imaging tools have been used routinely for years to assess damage caused by stroke, to hunt for brain tumours, and even identify the grey matter associated with language, love and memories. But this study was different. As each volunteer took their turn to slide into the coffin-like cylinder of the scanner, sticky fluids were squirted into their mouths. As unlikely as it sounds, the students were using multimillion pound medical equipment to take the Pepsi challenge.
Read Montague, the neuroscientist behind the Baylor experiment, is not alone in pushing the boundaries of neuroscience beyond the clinical. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have used brain-imaging equipment to try to reveal our innermost thoughts and feelings in less conventional "social neuroscience" experiments. As well as brand loyalty and consumer choice, neuroscientists are probing violent tendencies, moral reasoning, feelings of love and trust, and notions of justice. Just this week, researchers claimed to have used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain activity associated with racial prejudice.
While standard MRI machines like those still found in many hospitals take a snapshot of the brain, functional MRI is newer and more powerful because it takes lots of these snapshots one after the other, revealing how thoughts unfold over time. But the trend for using fMRI to probe social and behavioural issues is prompting some scientists to ask big questions about where this may all lead. Could it only be a matter of time before neuroscientists have techniques that can reveal secrets we would rather keep tucked under our skulls? According to some leading scientists, this isn't a paranoid over-reaction. "The CIA has been interested in fMRI for years as a means of doing lie-detection tests," says Bob Turner, an fMRI expert at University College London. After all, he says: "The brain can't lie."
As scientists unravel the links between how the brain looks and how it functions, some believe we will also be able to use images of the brain to see how people will behave. "There's no scientific distinction between prediction and understanding how the brain works," says Stephen Smith, associate director of the Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain at Oxford University.
The suggestion that brain scans could reveal not just our future health, but the intricacies of our personalities and how we might behave in a given situation, is unsettling enough to some scientists that they want legislation to stop brain-scan records falling into the wrong hands. "We're starting to get detailed information from these brain-scan experiments and soon people are going to be able to use it to predict an individual's behaviour," says Paul Glimcher at the Centre for Neuroscience at New York University. "That information has got to be proprietary to the individual."
The explosion in social neuroscience has been driven by the tumbling cost of scanning equipment. Brain scans used to be the preserve of medical and clinical experiments, because they relied on complex, expensive technology such as positron emission tomography (PET), which was only available in a handful of places. PET scanners, which rely on radioactive tracer materials, cost about £3m to buy and a single scan can cost as much as £2,000. In contrast, a new fMRI machine costs about £1.5m, and each scan works out at about £400.
The fMRI machines are essentially giant, powerful magnets that are used to detect the tiny magnetic fields carried by the hydrogen atoms in water (or blood). They allow a very detailed 3D map of blood flow to be built up, and in the head, blood flow means busy neurons. Studying which regions of the brain need the most blood tells scientists where the most thinking is going on. (The original MRI technique is identical to that used by chemists called nuclear magnetic resonance but the name was changed as it was thought nobody would want to be scanned by a machine with "nuclear" in its title).
As the scanners shifted from being an expensive piece of kit for specialist neuroscientists to a practical tool for anyone with the will to work it, the scientific questions the technique was used to investigate snowballed.
Three years ago, scientists at University College London used fMRI to investigate the essence of love. They recruited people who confessed to being hopelessly in love with their partners and showed them a series of photographs of people they knew, one of which was their partner. Although brain activity was different in each individual, the researchers found that in every case, four specific regions of the brain lit up each time they saw the one they loved. The researchers announced that they had discovered the brain's common denominator of romantic love.
A year later, Joshua Greene and colleagues at Princeton University in New Jersey studied how people solved moral dilemmas. In one test, volunteers were scanned while they were asked whether they would push a person in front of a speeding train if it meant saving the lives of five others. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the question caused a flurry of activity in parts of the brain linked with emotion, leading the researchers to conclude that such moral quandaries may not be solved purely by logical reasoning, but also by emotional reactions.
The technique has also been used to delve into the murky question of how we judge people. Last year, Ray Dolan's team at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London used fMRI to see how people judged the trustworthiness of strangers. Volunteers were shown a series of faces and asked to judge whether the person was trustworthy. The researchers found that a region of the brain called the amygdala and two other parts of the brain flickered more intensely when people were shown the faces of people they thought would not be trustworthy.
But according to some scientists, such studies are the tip of the iceberg. The better fMRI systems become, and the more adept scientists get at extracting information from them, the more they will be able to piece together the neural circuits that make us who we are.
One emerging field is that of "neuro-economics". At the Center for Neuro-economics at Claremont Graduate University in California, Paul Zak is using fMRI to study how people assign value to certain products and make choices about what they buy. "If I ask you why you made a certain decision, you might not really be sure," he says. "But what if I can look directly into your brain and see how you reached that decision? That's what we want to be able to do."
Slowly, he says, researchers are homing in on the neural circuits that are activated when we make decisions - our likes and dislikes or, for example, how much different people value cigarettes over other items. Know that, and you can start feeding the data into policies such as how you tax products, says Zak. "If you know how much people value something, you can work out at what point a price hike will stop people buying it," he says.
Zak says fMRI stands to make a big impact in what has been dubbed "neuro-marketing". As an example of how fMRI might be used, Zak proposes a company that wants to increase its sales of milk. One way it might is to gather a group of people who like milk and scan them as they drink a glass. Some of the regions of the brain that buzz with activity might be triggered by any drink, but others may be triggered only by milk. Find other stimuli that trigger these regions of the brain and it could help you work out what it is that makes milk enjoyable, says Zak. Suppose objects from your childhood made those regions of your brain flicker. It might be that milk was evoking a sense of nostalgia, reminding you of when you got milk at school.
"If it turned out that milk was pleasurable to drink because it evokes memories of your childhood, you could market it as 'good when you were a kid, great when you're an adult'," he says. It's just an idea, and we're not there yet, but Zak says this is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. "A couple of years ago there was a lot of hostility to this kind of research, but now people are realising there's potential in it. Of course there will be a lot of crappy studies, but done properly, it allows us to get answers to questions we could never get before."
At Glimcher's lab in New York, progress is being made into understanding how the brain allow us to make certain decisions. Using fMRI scans and another technique that measures the activity of single neurons, Glimcher has recreated in a computer the neural programs that monkeys use to make decisions in a simple financial game. "Their behaviour is quite erratic and very similar to that of humans, but the program predicts what they will do to about 95% accuracy. It's spooky," he says. Ultimately, says Glimcher, neuroscientists should be able to use techniques like this to work out what a person will do in a specific situation, such as what he or she might buy when they walk into a shop.
At least one company, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, in Atlanta, has been set up to exploit brain scans to inform marketing strategies. Instead of using focus groups, it is trying to use scans to tell companies what people think of their products and commercials.
Not everyone is convinced of the approach though. Donald Kennedy, the Stanford University-based editor of the journal Science and one of America's most eminent scientists, says: "You could just ask people what they think."
While Glimcher concedes that using brain scans to predict behaviour is a long way off, the progress is such that we should think about the implications, he says. "It raises serious philosophical questions, because it reduces us to a machine, but there's also a huge moral issue." Who should be allowed access to our brain scans, if they can reveal so much about us, he asks. "Within 10 years, we will need legislation that protects brain-scan information in the same way genetic information is protected," he says.
If using brain scans to predict specific behaviour is not on the cards, using them to judge if we will suffer from mental disease later in life is. Studies have shown that fMRI scans can be used to reveal early signs of multiple sclerosis and even go some way to predicting who might be most susceptible to dementias such as Alzheimer's. "For severe mental illness and dementias it is a serious proposition," says Sean Spence, a psychiatry researcher at Sheffield University. "There are changes in their brain before they begin to lose their memory. It's quite conceivable people could use that."
Stanford's Kennedy says it is the potential to use scans to predict people's health that is a concern. "I'm worried about fMRI scans being preserved after they have been taken," he says. "There's a push to prevent genetic information being used by companies for adverse selection, and at least equal protection should be given to brain scan data."
Glimcher says legislation banning access to people's brain scans should be drawn up to keep the data private before it's too late. "It's only a matter of time before the insurance companies come calling," he says. "It is going to happen and it's a big issue. It has to be dealt with soon."
See the full article at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/nov/20/neuroscience.science
- - - - - - -
From Channel Five website seach for 'My Strange Brain'
My Strange Brain - Tackling difficult neurological conditions
This new documentary series explores unusual neurological conditions. The first instalment profiles four people with different disorders that affect their memories and sleeping patterns. One woman was struck down by a virus that has erased all her recollections of the last 20 years, while another woman is unable to record new memories. The film also meets a man who loses his muscle tone every time he experiences heightened emotions.You may also like...
. . . . .Link added here for easy reference 12 Sept 2008:www.spring.org.uk Jeremy Dean's Psyblog site about 'understanding how our minds work and why we think and act the way we do'.
Information & links to articles appearing in psychology journals:
social psychology, memory, non-verbal behaviour, emotions, neuroscience, persuasion, relationships. Other Psychology Blogs are listed on the site starting HERE.
Psyblog updates can be emailed to you.. . . . .
Dissociation/ DID; Memes; Garden analogy
I wanted to add a few ideas in here because they seem relevant. Norman mentioned a book by Adam Crabtree entitled 'Multiple Man' which I won't go into in detail here but the full title is 'Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality'. It was published in paperback in 1988 by Grafton Books but you may be able to pick up a copy.
Whether one feels there is any validity to the concept of possession, or of multiple personality (which now gets called DID indicating dissociation) the author makes an interesting point about his experiences taking groups through a technique called Psychodrama where people act out different roles in a scene. He found that, not only did people with little acting ability or inclination often do well at it, but they managed with little information on the personality and role they were asked to play.
He says (p.337) 'There seems to be within people a natural ability to take on a personality other than their own and to act from within that assumed personality. They appear to actually become that personality and to some extent, leave their own personality behind. The English word which most closely expresses this phenomenon is 'personation'. My experience with psychodrama shows me that human beings may be said to have the innate capacity to 'personate', to take on full-blown personalities and act from within them.'
He goes on to describe personality as a tool (p.339) concluding 'I think there is reason to believe that the whole of man's emotional life is centred around the invention and utilization of those tools that we call 'personalities'.'
by Kaytrin
---
Psychosynthesis and various broadly similar approaches use working with parts of the personality, or subpersonalities, perhaps giving each one a name and looking at how useful or otherwise they are for our overall functioning.
Another theme which could have relevance is the concept of the 'shadow', or darker side of ourselves which we may be disinclined to acknowledge - but which others can sometimes see perhaps because of their own acknowledged or unacknowledged parts. It's a strange old world and that includes humans!
I think it's fair to say though that most of us, much of the time, have some idea what happened in our lives this week, last week, this year, last year, going further back with some chain of connection. For people who tend to dissociate to a significant degree as part of their psychological make-up, it doesn't happen that way, and they may literally be unaware of things which happened while they were in quite a different state of mind.
I've known people who are naturally like that anyway, but it can happen too if they have been through bad experiences that they need to keep mostly shut away, or if someone encouraged or forced them to be like that. It can make it hard to plan things properly if they can't remember a bad outcome to something and take steps to avoid it again. And it can be hard for those around them if they don't know enough of the circumstances to understand.
It would be inappropriate of me not to say that I have doubts about some of the therapeutic approaches used with people who have been severely traumatised. No-one can know all the answers for each situation, and care needs to be taken so that a process which is aimed at helping someone does not cause unnecessary problems - for them, for you, for others close to the situation. If we take on board Adam Crabtree's work mentioned above on Psychodrama, and work undertaken on 'confabulation' we need to be careful that expectations or some other factors don't come into play as being factual, which doesn't mean people are deliberate liars either!
Often we can only get nearer to the truth without having a bias, and it does damage to vulnerable people to impose a bias on them in any direction, and whether it is subconsciously passing from us to them, or is somehow more tangible.
On a similar theme is 'A garden analogy of personality' (now pasted in at the end of this piece) which could have relevance for the way ordinary people we know can change, or appear to change. Certainly I have known people who became quite different over the years, as if some parts or modes fell away for a time and others came to the fore. Perhaps that is due to specific events or circumstances, perhaps due to chemical changes in the brain, or perhaps we do indeed use personality modes as vital 'tools' to get us through.
I won't list any other particular books but you can search on Amazon, Google etc. and find something which suits the kind of questions you may have.
- - - - - - -
Other, better theories about DID, MPD?
by Harlan
Reading your site, and with some interest in all this, I wonder whether there are other factors or explanations not necessarily exclusive to some of the views or theories, but could they complement them somehow if we let them?
In some quarters, Freudian theories have been completely thrown out or drastically questioned. Some detractors claim that nothing from anyone with a psychoanalytic approach has validity. The inference can get drawn by writers - or readers - that what people feel happened to them regarding abuse is simply the mind telling them what to think.
It does seem likely that some approaches to therapy can encourage this tendency without perhaps intending to, but I will not get into those aspects just now.
Richard Webster makes some interesting points on his website. I also read around the subject of 'anti-therapy' and so on, and admit to a sneaky feeling that some therapy spiel plays into a need that people feel for something to 'make sense' in their hour of need. I do believe we can work on a societal approach that marginalises less people, a type of society that does not make people think themselves inadequate because of what is put forward that suggests they are.
Moving on ...
Looking for something specific about MPD or DID, I came across mention of a book by Ralph Allison and his model for dissociation of different parts of the personality occurring more in some people or circumstances than the rest of the population. An expensive book but there's always background information on Google etc. so one doesn't have to purchase everything!
That led to the subject of memes and schemas, which I do not know a great deal about, only what I've read previously and now. One can search around the concepts and the term 'SocioPsychology' would clue the search engine in also. I wish I had the time to look into this more.
It all seems to take in concepts relating to social environment and even genes, along with ideas/memes having a life of their own, with a basic need to survive and propagate themselves independently of their human hosts - us or our brains.
There is a concept of 'selfplexes', a hypothetical grid of the various ways people can behave. Theoretically one could place a person's behaviour or tendencies into an area or areas, a bit like repertory grid theory for plotting attitudes or behaviour.
Although that may seem in direct contrast to some ideas about MPD or DID, and some people might take it that way, it could tie in. Someone on here mentioned Psychodrama with people showing a natural capacity to draw more things out of a scene or situation than they actually know of. There was a mention on here about people using personality or subpersonalities as tools in different situations. That would tie in with some ideas and research in Social Psychology.
I can't help feeling it could/ would/ should tie in somehow with ideas about mythology, fairy tales or nursery rhymes having an unseen but significant influence on people's lives, like the heading for your Blog maybe?
Thanks for the opportunity. I hope someone makes sense out of this and can take it further. All I'd like to add is I don't think 'truth' or the search for it, should be a money-making venture or an attempt to put-one-over on anyone else.
- - - - - - -
Included below with permission -
'A garden analogy of personality'
It seems to me that higher cult members regard the cult as their territory, and each cult member as a small garden for them to manipulate or harvest in some way according to some overall plan. Picture a garden with some indigenous plants, personae, of one person. Decide which ones you want to nurture, cut back, dig up, and which ones you actually want to implant. You have an overall garden plan, which needs to be adaptable to how plants develop, and outside circumstances such as the weather, the neighbouring gardens and their influence. In any garden, some plants tend to grow and obscure or kill other plants. You work with what you have according to what you want to achieve. It becomes ‘yours’.
One could also use an analogy of a house. It was built in a certain way, different inhabitants altering it, with the concept that they own it and it is an extension of themselves with some character of its own. The colours and shapes and utilities in the rooms are set to complement the owner and purpose of the room, and how the owner wants to present to themselves, and to others who may visit.
Another useful concept is that of the family or tribe or nation. Fred West said that he owned his children so he could do what he wanted with them. Many cultures have a strong sense of extended family and behave in an adaptive and congenial way towards each other’s needs. I believe in Ireland the culture exists that one not only belongs to a family but is owned by it. Nations have certain national identities and traits which may come into conflict with other nations for any real or inferred reason. The English system of manors and farm-workers meant that during the First World War, the lord of the manor could feel he had the right to enlist the men ‘under him’ to war because they were his to command. The concept of the feudal system is also relevant here.
According to theories of Jung, psychosynthesis, parts therapy and others, we all have several personae or alters, partly influenced by the social or other circumstances at the time, how we feel, or which someone else can evoke in us. Cults build on all these to suit their own purposes, also using psycho-analytic theory, not to help people, but to control them, and behavioural techniques such as positive and negative reinforcement.
To return to the garden concept, imagine it has a wall around it with a gate, although probably places where someone can enter the garden and have their way with it. This is how most of us are, with a general concept of personal boundaries and free will where possible. Cults have a very different notion, that the person belongs more to them than to themselves as individuals, and that members must follow the cult’s will both overall, and of the specific moment. One could also use the analogy of communist culture where the individual is said to exist for the purpose of the state, rather than the state being there to assist them.
Being in contact with a cult member can be like any other interaction up to a point. One forms a relationship with a particular part or parts of the personality, and regards them as being the main ‘owners’ there. When other parts surface with different ways and needs, we do what we can with those too, but obviously there can be conflicts where it is hard to know what is appropriate overall. Cults induce and encourage conflicts to suit their purposes.
So the garden gets modified, certain personae come and go or remain dormant, some are cut back perhaps to allow others to grow or spread, or because there is too much of them to suit the purpose. Some plants will seed themselves naturally, and some will be deliberately planted. Some get weeded out although may re-seed themselves somewhere. Some personae may be grafted onto others. Some get totally extinguished. If the cult decide to extinguish the main persona or personae, eventually there is nothing substantial left of the original person, i.e. it is totally theirs, the cult’s.
I think the cult get into difficulties when links are forged with people who are not cult-oriented, such as in therapy or a friendship or partnership. The cult does all it can to break that link, and it may be that they cannot use the ‘garden’ as their own and actually harvest it, or whatever it is that they do.
- - - - - - -
Whether one feels there is any validity to the concept of possession, or of multiple personality (which now gets called DID indicating dissociation) the author makes an interesting point about his experiences taking groups through a technique called Psychodrama where people act out different roles in a scene. He found that, not only did people with little acting ability or inclination often do well at it, but they managed with little information on the personality and role they were asked to play.
He says (p.337) 'There seems to be within people a natural ability to take on a personality other than their own and to act from within that assumed personality. They appear to actually become that personality and to some extent, leave their own personality behind. The English word which most closely expresses this phenomenon is 'personation'. My experience with psychodrama shows me that human beings may be said to have the innate capacity to 'personate', to take on full-blown personalities and act from within them.'
He goes on to describe personality as a tool (p.339) concluding 'I think there is reason to believe that the whole of man's emotional life is centred around the invention and utilization of those tools that we call 'personalities'.'
by Kaytrin
---
Psychosynthesis and various broadly similar approaches use working with parts of the personality, or subpersonalities, perhaps giving each one a name and looking at how useful or otherwise they are for our overall functioning.
Another theme which could have relevance is the concept of the 'shadow', or darker side of ourselves which we may be disinclined to acknowledge - but which others can sometimes see perhaps because of their own acknowledged or unacknowledged parts. It's a strange old world and that includes humans!
I think it's fair to say though that most of us, much of the time, have some idea what happened in our lives this week, last week, this year, last year, going further back with some chain of connection. For people who tend to dissociate to a significant degree as part of their psychological make-up, it doesn't happen that way, and they may literally be unaware of things which happened while they were in quite a different state of mind.
I've known people who are naturally like that anyway, but it can happen too if they have been through bad experiences that they need to keep mostly shut away, or if someone encouraged or forced them to be like that. It can make it hard to plan things properly if they can't remember a bad outcome to something and take steps to avoid it again. And it can be hard for those around them if they don't know enough of the circumstances to understand.
It would be inappropriate of me not to say that I have doubts about some of the therapeutic approaches used with people who have been severely traumatised. No-one can know all the answers for each situation, and care needs to be taken so that a process which is aimed at helping someone does not cause unnecessary problems - for them, for you, for others close to the situation. If we take on board Adam Crabtree's work mentioned above on Psychodrama, and work undertaken on 'confabulation' we need to be careful that expectations or some other factors don't come into play as being factual, which doesn't mean people are deliberate liars either!
Often we can only get nearer to the truth without having a bias, and it does damage to vulnerable people to impose a bias on them in any direction, and whether it is subconsciously passing from us to them, or is somehow more tangible.
On a similar theme is 'A garden analogy of personality' (now pasted in at the end of this piece) which could have relevance for the way ordinary people we know can change, or appear to change. Certainly I have known people who became quite different over the years, as if some parts or modes fell away for a time and others came to the fore. Perhaps that is due to specific events or circumstances, perhaps due to chemical changes in the brain, or perhaps we do indeed use personality modes as vital 'tools' to get us through.
I won't list any other particular books but you can search on Amazon, Google etc. and find something which suits the kind of questions you may have.
- - - - - - -
Other, better theories about DID, MPD?
by Harlan
Reading your site, and with some interest in all this, I wonder whether there are other factors or explanations not necessarily exclusive to some of the views or theories, but could they complement them somehow if we let them?
In some quarters, Freudian theories have been completely thrown out or drastically questioned. Some detractors claim that nothing from anyone with a psychoanalytic approach has validity. The inference can get drawn by writers - or readers - that what people feel happened to them regarding abuse is simply the mind telling them what to think.
It does seem likely that some approaches to therapy can encourage this tendency without perhaps intending to, but I will not get into those aspects just now.
Richard Webster makes some interesting points on his website. I also read around the subject of 'anti-therapy' and so on, and admit to a sneaky feeling that some therapy spiel plays into a need that people feel for something to 'make sense' in their hour of need. I do believe we can work on a societal approach that marginalises less people, a type of society that does not make people think themselves inadequate because of what is put forward that suggests they are.
Moving on ...
Looking for something specific about MPD or DID, I came across mention of a book by Ralph Allison and his model for dissociation of different parts of the personality occurring more in some people or circumstances than the rest of the population. An expensive book but there's always background information on Google etc. so one doesn't have to purchase everything!
That led to the subject of memes and schemas, which I do not know a great deal about, only what I've read previously and now. One can search around the concepts and the term 'SocioPsychology' would clue the search engine in also. I wish I had the time to look into this more.
It all seems to take in concepts relating to social environment and even genes, along with ideas/memes having a life of their own, with a basic need to survive and propagate themselves independently of their human hosts - us or our brains.
There is a concept of 'selfplexes', a hypothetical grid of the various ways people can behave. Theoretically one could place a person's behaviour or tendencies into an area or areas, a bit like repertory grid theory for plotting attitudes or behaviour.
Although that may seem in direct contrast to some ideas about MPD or DID, and some people might take it that way, it could tie in. Someone on here mentioned Psychodrama with people showing a natural capacity to draw more things out of a scene or situation than they actually know of. There was a mention on here about people using personality or subpersonalities as tools in different situations. That would tie in with some ideas and research in Social Psychology.
I can't help feeling it could/ would/ should tie in somehow with ideas about mythology, fairy tales or nursery rhymes having an unseen but significant influence on people's lives, like the heading for your Blog maybe?
Thanks for the opportunity. I hope someone makes sense out of this and can take it further. All I'd like to add is I don't think 'truth' or the search for it, should be a money-making venture or an attempt to put-one-over on anyone else.
- - - - - - -
Included below with permission -
'A garden analogy of personality'
It seems to me that higher cult members regard the cult as their territory, and each cult member as a small garden for them to manipulate or harvest in some way according to some overall plan. Picture a garden with some indigenous plants, personae, of one person. Decide which ones you want to nurture, cut back, dig up, and which ones you actually want to implant. You have an overall garden plan, which needs to be adaptable to how plants develop, and outside circumstances such as the weather, the neighbouring gardens and their influence. In any garden, some plants tend to grow and obscure or kill other plants. You work with what you have according to what you want to achieve. It becomes ‘yours’.
One could also use an analogy of a house. It was built in a certain way, different inhabitants altering it, with the concept that they own it and it is an extension of themselves with some character of its own. The colours and shapes and utilities in the rooms are set to complement the owner and purpose of the room, and how the owner wants to present to themselves, and to others who may visit.
Another useful concept is that of the family or tribe or nation. Fred West said that he owned his children so he could do what he wanted with them. Many cultures have a strong sense of extended family and behave in an adaptive and congenial way towards each other’s needs. I believe in Ireland the culture exists that one not only belongs to a family but is owned by it. Nations have certain national identities and traits which may come into conflict with other nations for any real or inferred reason. The English system of manors and farm-workers meant that during the First World War, the lord of the manor could feel he had the right to enlist the men ‘under him’ to war because they were his to command. The concept of the feudal system is also relevant here.
According to theories of Jung, psychosynthesis, parts therapy and others, we all have several personae or alters, partly influenced by the social or other circumstances at the time, how we feel, or which someone else can evoke in us. Cults build on all these to suit their own purposes, also using psycho-analytic theory, not to help people, but to control them, and behavioural techniques such as positive and negative reinforcement.
To return to the garden concept, imagine it has a wall around it with a gate, although probably places where someone can enter the garden and have their way with it. This is how most of us are, with a general concept of personal boundaries and free will where possible. Cults have a very different notion, that the person belongs more to them than to themselves as individuals, and that members must follow the cult’s will both overall, and of the specific moment. One could also use the analogy of communist culture where the individual is said to exist for the purpose of the state, rather than the state being there to assist them.
Being in contact with a cult member can be like any other interaction up to a point. One forms a relationship with a particular part or parts of the personality, and regards them as being the main ‘owners’ there. When other parts surface with different ways and needs, we do what we can with those too, but obviously there can be conflicts where it is hard to know what is appropriate overall. Cults induce and encourage conflicts to suit their purposes.
So the garden gets modified, certain personae come and go or remain dormant, some are cut back perhaps to allow others to grow or spread, or because there is too much of them to suit the purpose. Some plants will seed themselves naturally, and some will be deliberately planted. Some get weeded out although may re-seed themselves somewhere. Some personae may be grafted onto others. Some get totally extinguished. If the cult decide to extinguish the main persona or personae, eventually there is nothing substantial left of the original person, i.e. it is totally theirs, the cult’s.
I think the cult get into difficulties when links are forged with people who are not cult-oriented, such as in therapy or a friendship or partnership. The cult does all it can to break that link, and it may be that they cannot use the ‘garden’ as their own and actually harvest it, or whatever it is that they do.
- - - - - - -
Was apparent ritual abuse basically an excuse for extreme social engineering and control, leading women - in particular - to think they had no rights, and behaving as if Hicktown was a veritable Stepford Life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVz2sN3qcA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVz2sN3qcA
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