Across at Wired, Amy Wallace has a long but riveting article about Amy Bishop, the neuroscience professor who shot her colleagues at the University of Alabama last year, killing three.

It's a fascinating article because of the picture it paints of a killer and it's well worth the time to read. Yet it doesn't really answer the question posed in the title: "What Made This University Scientist Snap?"

Wallace notes the theory that Bishop snapped because she was denied tenure at the University, a serious blow to anyone's career and especially to someone who, apparantly, believed she was destined for great things. However, she points out that the timing doesn't fit: Bishop was denied tenure several months before the shooting. And she shot at some of the faculty who voted in her favor, ruling out a simple "revenge" motive.

But even if Bishop had snapped the day after she found out about the tenure decision, what would that explain? Thousands of people are denied tenure every year. This has been going on for decades. No-one except Bishop has ever decided to pick up a gun in response.

Bishop had always displayed a streak of senseless violence; in 1986, she killed her 18 year old brother with a shotgun in her own kitchen. She was 21. The death was ruled an accident, but probably wasn't. It's not clear what it was, though: Bishop had no clear motive.

Amy had said something that upset her father. That morning they’d squabbled, and at about 11:30 am, Sam, a film professor at Northeastern University, left the family’s Victorian home to go shopping... Amy, 21, was in her bedroom upstairs. She was worried about “robbers,” she would later tell the police. So she loaded her father’s 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and accidentally discharged a round in her room. The blast struck a lamp and a mirror and blew a hole in the wall...

The gun, a Mossberg model 500A, holds multiple rounds and must be pumped after each discharge to chamber another shell. Bishop had loaded the gun with number-four lead shot. After firing the round into the wall, she could have put the weapon aside. Instead, she took it downstairs and walked into the kitchen. At some point, she pumped the gun, chambering another round.

...[her mother] told police she was at the sink and Seth was by the stove when Amy appeared. “I have a shell in the gun, and I don’t know how to unload it,” Judy told police her daughter said. Judy continued, “I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him.”

There's a lot of talk, much of it rather speculative, about "neuroethics" nowadays.

But there's one all too real ethical dilemma, a direct consequence of modern neuroscience, that gets very little attention. This is the problem of incidental findings on MRI scans.

An "incidental finding" is when you scan someone's brain for research purposes, and, unexpectedly, notice that something looks wrong with it. This is surprisingly common: estimates range from 2–8% of the general population. It will happen to you if you regularly use MRI or fMRI for research purposes, and when it does, it's a shock. Especially when the brain in question belongs to someone you know. Friends, family and colleagues are often the first to be recruited for MRI studies.

This is why it's vital to have a system in place for dealing with incidental findings. Any responsible MRI scanning centre will have one, and as a researcher you ought to be familiar with it. But what system is best?

Broadly speaking there are two extreme positions:

1. Research scans are not designed for diagnosis, and 99% of MRI researchers are not qualified to make a diagnosis. What looks "abnormal" to Joe Neuroscientist BSc or even Dr Bob Psychiatrist is rarely a sign of illness, and likewise they can easily miss real diseases. So, we should ignore incidental findings, pretend the scan never happened, because for all clinical purposes, it didn't.
2. You have to do whatever you can with an incidental finding. You have the scans, like it or not, and if you ignore them, you're putting lives at risk. No, they're not clinical scans, they can still detect many diseases. So all scans should be examined by a qualified neuroradiologist, and any abnormalities which are possibly pathological should be followed-up.

What's the difference between walking down the street yesterday, and walking down the street tomorrow?

It's nothing to do with the walking, or the street: that's the same. When seems to be something external to the what, how, and where of the situation. But this creates a problem for neuroscientists.

We think we know how the fact that the brain could store the concept of "walking down the street" (or "walking" and "street"). Very roughly, simple sensory impressions are thought to get built up into more and more complex combinations, and this happens as you move away from the brain's primary visual cortex (V1) and down the so-called ventral visual stream.

In area V1, cells respond mostly to nothing more complex than position and the orientations of straight lines: / or \ or _ , etc. Whereas once you get to the temporal lobe, far down the stream, you have cells that respond to Jennifer Aniston. In between are progressively more complex collections of features.

Even if the details are wrong, the fact that complex objects are composed of simpler parts and ultimately raw sensations, means that our ability to process complex scenes doesn't seem too mysterious, given that we have senses.

But the fact that we can take any given scene, and effortlessly think of it as either "past", "present", or "future", is puzzling under this view because, as I said, the scene itself is the same in all cases. And it's not as if we have a sense devoted to time: the only time we're ever directly aware of, is "right now".

Swedish neuroscientists Nyberg et al used fMRI to measure brain activity associated with "mental time travel": Consciousness of subjective time in the brain. They scanned volunteers and asked them imagine walking between two points, in 4 different situations: past, present, future, or remembered (as opposed to imagined in the past). This short walk was one which they'd really done, many times.

What happened?
Compared to a control task of doing mental arithmetic, both remembering and imagining the walk activated numerous brain areas and there was very strong overlap between the two conditions. No big surprise there.

The crucial contrast was between remembering, past imagining and future imagining, vs. imagining in the present. This revealed a rather cute little blob:

This small nugget of the left parietal cortex represents an area where the brain is more active when thinking about times other than the present, relative to thinking about the same thing, but right now. They note that this area "partly overlaps a left angular region shown to be recruited during both past and future thinking and with parietal regions implicated in self-projection in past, present, or future time."

So what? This is a nice study, but like most fMRI it doesn't tell us what this area is actually doing. To know that, we'd need to know what would happen to someone if that area were damaged. Would they be unable to imagine any time except the present? Would they think their memories were happening right now? Maybe you could use rTMS could temporarily inactivate it - if you could find volunteers willing to lose their sense of time for a while...

Nyberg L, Kim AS, Habib R, Levine B, & Tulving E (2010). Consciousness of subjective time in the brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 21135219

A group of Italian psychiatrists claim to explain How Neuroscience and Behavioral Genetics Improve Psychiatric Assessment: Report on a Violent Murder Case.

The paper presents the horrific case of a 24 year old woman from Switzerland who smothered her newborn son to death immediately after giving birth in her boyfriend's apartment. After her arrest, she claimed to have no memory of the event. She had a history of multiple drug abuse, including heroin, from the age of 13.

I'm reading Le Rouge et le Noir ("The Red and the Black"), an 1830 French novel by Stendhal...

One passage in particular struck me. Stendhal is describing two characters who are falling in love (mostly); both are young, have lived all their lives in a backwater provincial town, and neither has been well educated.

This map is not “upside down”. It looks that way to us; the sense that north is up is a deeply ingrained one. It's grim up north, Dixie is away down south. Yet this is pure convention. The earth is a sphere in space. It has a north and a south, but no up and down.

There’s a famous experiment involving four guys and a door. An unsuspecting test subject is lured into a conversation with a stranger, actually a psychologist. After a few moments, two people appear carrying a large door, and they walk right between the subject and the experimenter.

Behind the door, the experimenter swaps places with one of the door carriers, who may be quite different in voice and appearance. Most subjects don't notice the swap. Perception is lazy: whenever it can get away with it, it merely tells us that things are as we expect, rather than actually showing us stuff. We often do not really perceive things at all. Did the subject really see the first guy? The second? Either?

The inverted map makes us actually see the Earth's geography, rather than just showing us the expected "countries" and "continents". I was struck by how parochial Europe is – the whole place is little more than a frayed end of the vast Eurasian landmass, no more impressive than the one at the other end, Russia's Chukotski. Africa dominates the scene: it can no longer be written off as that poor place at the bottom.

One of the most common observations in psychotherapy of people with depression or anxiety is that they hold themselves to impossibly high standards, although they have a perfectly sensible evaluation of everyone else. Their own failures are catastrophic; other people's are minor setbacks. Other people's successes are well-deserved triumphs; their own are never good enough, flukes, they don't count.

The first step in challenging these unhelpful patterns of thought is to simply point out the double-standard: why are you such a perfectionist about yourself, when you're not when it comes to other people? The idea being to help people to think about themselves in more like healthy way they already think about others. Turn the map of yourself upside down - what do you actually see?

How many fingers do you have?

10, obviously, unless you've been the victim of an accident or a birth defect. Everyone knows that. You count up to ten on your fingers, for one thing.

But look at your left hand - how many fingers are on it? Little finger, ring finger, middle finger, first finger... thumb. So that's 4. But then we'd only have 8 fingers, and we all know we have 10. Unless the thumb is a finger, but is it?

Hmm. Hard to say. Wikipedia has some interesting facts about this question, and on Google if you start to type in "is the thumb", the top suggested search terms are all about this issue. It's a tricky one. People don't seem to know for sure.

But does that mean there's any real mystery about the thumb? No - we understand it as well as any other part of the body. We know all about the bones and muscles and joints and nerves of the thumb, we know how it works, what it does, even its evolutionary history (see The Panda's Thumb by Steven J Gould, still one of the greatest popular science books ever.) Science has got thumbs covered.

The mystery is in the English language, which isn't quite clear on whether the word "finger" encompasses the human thumb; for some purposes it does, i.e. we have 10 fingers, but for other purposes it probably doesn't, although even English speakers seem to be in two minds about the details (see Google, above).

Notice that although the messiness seems to focus on the thumb, the word "thumb" is perfectly clear. The ambiguity is rather in the word "finger", which can mean either any of the digits of the hand, or, the digits of the hand with three joints. Take a look at your hand again and you'll notice that your thumb lacks a joint compared to the fingers; something I must admit I'd forgotten until Wikipedia reminded me.

Yet it would be very easy to blame the thumb for the confusion. After all, the other 4 fingers are definitely fingers. The fingers are playing by the rules. Only the thumb is a troublemaker. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise to realize that it's the fingers, not the thumb, that are the problem.

Much of Britain is currently following the trial of Steven Griffiths, or as he'd like you to refer to him, the Crossbow Cannibal.

Serial killers are always newsworthy, and Griffiths has killed at least three women in cold blood. (He did use a crossbow, but I think the newspapers made up the cannibalism.) But it's Griffiths's interests that have really got people's attention.

It turns out that before he became a serial killer, he was a man obsessed with... serial killers. His Amazon wish list was full of books about murder. He has a degree in psychology, and he was working on his PhD, in Criminology. Guess what his research was about.

Griffiths is therefore a kind of real life Hannibal Lecter or Dexter, an expert in murderers who is himself one. He's also a good example of the fact that, unlike on TV, real life serial killers are never cool and sophisticated, nor even charmingly eccentric, just weird and pathetic. Not to mention lazy, given that he was still working on his PhD after 6 years...

Yet there is an interesting question: was Griffiths a good criminologist? Does he have a unique insight into serial killers? We'll probably never know, at least not until (or if) the police release some of his writings. But it seems to me that he might have done.

When the average person hears about the crimes of someone like Griffiths, we are not just shocked but confused - it seems incomprehensible. I can understand why someone would want to rob me for my wallet, because I like money too. I can understand how one guy might kill another in a drunken fight, because I've been drunk too. Of course this doesn't mean I condone either crime, but they don't leave me scratching my head; I can see how it happens.

I cannot begin to understand why Griffiths did what he did. My understanding of humanity doesn't cover him. But he is human, so all that really means is that my understanding is limited. Someone understands people like Griffiths, it can't be impossible; but it may be that the only way to understand a serial killer is to be one.

The same may be true of less dramatic mental disorders. Karl Jaspers believed that the hallmark of severe mental illness is symptoms that are impossible to understand: they just exist. I've experienced depression; I've also read an awful lot about it and published academic papers on it. My own illness taught me much more about depression than my reading. Maybe I've been reading the wrong things. I don't think so.

I have two cats. One is about four, and he is a psychopath. The other is sixteen - elderly, in cat terms - and I've recently noticed some changes in her behaviour.

For one, she's become a lot more affectionate, and she demands constant attention - she meows at people on sight, follows you around, and almost always comes and sits on top of you, or on top of whatever you're doing/reading/typing.

But on top of that, she's started pausing in the middle of whatever she's doing and staring at empty corners, or walls. All cats sit down and gaze into space a lot of the time, but this is different - it happens in the middle of normal actions, like eating or walking around. What does this mean?

Could she be hallucinating? Hallucinations are unfortunately not uncommon in elderly people. Seeing and hearing things that aren't there is a major symptom of Alzheimer's, and other forms of dementia. Do cats get Alzheimer's? The internet says: yes. In terms of scientific research there doesn't seem to have been much, but a few studies have found Alzheimer's-like changes (amyloid-beta protein accumulation) in the brains of old cats. Whether these cause the same symptoms as they do in people is unclear, but, why not?

How would you know if an animal was hallucinating? They can't talk about it, and unlike say hunger or pain, they don't have specific ways of communicating it through body language or cries. A hallucinating animal would, presumably, react fairly normally to whatever it thought it saw or heard: so hallucinations would manifest as normal behaviours, but in inappropriate situations. Whether this is what's happening to my cat, I'm not sure, but again, it's possible.

A more philosophical issue is whether we can conclude that this kind of out-of-context behaviour means the animal is experiencing a hallucination. But this is really just the age old question of whether animals have conciousness at all. If they do, then they can presumably hallucinate: if you can be concious of sensations, you can be concious of false sensations.

For what its worth, my view is that animals, at any rate for mammals, are concious. Humans are (although technically we only know for sure that we personally are, and have to assume the same is true of others.) Mammalian brains are structured in a similar way to our own; they're made of the same cells; they use the same neurotransmitters and the same drugs interfere with them in the same ways; pretty much all of the brain regions are there, although the sizes differ.

There's of course a big difference between us and other mammals: we have language, and conceptual thinking, and so forth. But does conciousness depend on that? It seems unlikely, just because most of what we're concious of at any one time isn't anything to do with those specifically human things.

Right now, I'm concious of what I can see, what I can hear, what I can feel with my fingertips, and the thoughts I'm writing down. Only 1/4 of that (to put it crudely) is unique to humans. And I'm not always aware of thoughts or words; there are plenty of times when I'm only aware of sensations and perceptions.

Probably the closest we get to animal conciousness is in strong, primitive experiences like pain, panic and anger, in which we "take leave of our senses" - not meaning that we become unconscious, but that we temporarily stop being able to "think straight" i.e. like a human. That doesn't mean that animals spend all their time in some extreme emotional state, but it's harder for us to know what it's like to be a relaxed cat because generally when we're relaxed, we're thinking (or daydreaming, etc. Although who's to say cats don't? They dream, after all...)

Capitalists beware. No less a journal than Nature has just published a paper proving conclusively that the human brain is a Communist, and that it's plotting the overthrow of the bourgeois order and its replacement by the revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat even as we speak.

Kind of. The article, Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences, doesn't mention the C word, but it does claim to have found evidence that people's brains display more egalitarianism than people themselves admit to.

Tricomi et al took 20 pairs of men. At the start of the study, both men got a $30 payment, but one member of each pair was then randomly chosen to get a $50 bonus. Thus, one guy was "rich", while the other was "poor". Both men then had fMRI scans, during which they were offered various sums of money and saw their partner being offered money too. They rated how "appealing" these money transfers were on a 10 point scale.

What happened? Unsurprisingly both "rich" and "poor" said that they were pleased at the prospect of getting more cash for themselves, the poor somewhat more so, but people also had opinions about payments to the other guy:

caution should be exercised in the use of reverse inference... In my opinion, reverse inference should be viewed as another tool (albeit an imperfect one) with which to advance our understanding of the mind and brain. In particular, reverse inferences can suggest novel hypotheses that can then be tested in subsequent experiments.

You may already have heard about Desiree Jennings.

In a matter of a few short weeks I lost the ability to walk, talk normally, and focus on more than one stimuli at a time. Whenever I eat I know, without fail, that my body will soon go into uncontrollable convulsions coupled with periods of blacking out.

I predict that they will be able to “cure” her, because psychogenic disorders can and do spontaneously resolve. They will then claim victory for their quackery in curing a (non-existent) vaccine injury.

People seem more willing to accept the mind-over-matter powers of "the placebo" than they are to accept the existence of psychosomatic illness.

Last month Wired, announced that Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

The article's a good read, and the basic story is true, at least in the case of psychiatric drugs. In clinical trials, people taking placebos do seem to get better more often now than in the past (paper). This is a big problem for Big Pharma, because it means that experimental new drugs often fail to perform better than placebo, i.e. they don't work. Wired have just noticed this, but it's been being discussed in the academic literature for several years.

Why is this? No-one knows. There have been many suggestions - maybe people "believe in" the benefits of drugs more nowadays, so the placebo effect is greater; maybe clinical trials are recruiting people with milder illnesses that respond better to placebo, or just get better on their own. But we really don't have any clear idea.

What if the confusion is because of the very concept of the "placebo"? Earlier this year, the BMJ ran a short opinion piece called It’s time to put the placebo out of our misery. Robin Nunn wants us to "stop thinking in terms of placebo...The placebo construct conceals more than it clarifies."

"Statistically, airplane travel is safer than driving..." "Statistically, you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to..." "Statistically, the benefits outweigh the risks..."

What does statistically mean in sentences like this? Strictly speaking, nothing at all. If airplane travel is safer than driving, then that's just a fact. (It is true on an hour-by-hour basis). There's no statistically about it. A fact can't be somehow statistically true, but not really true. Indeed, if anything, it's the opposite: if there are statistics proving something, it's more likely to be true than if there aren't any.

But we often treat the word statistically as a qualifier, something than makes a statement less than really true. This is because psychologically, statistical truth is often different to, and less real than, other kinds of truth. As everyone knows, Joseph Stalin said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. Actually, Stalin didn't say that, but it's true. And if someone has a fear of flying, then all the statistics in the world probably won't change that. Emotions are innumerate.

(Via Bad Science) Here's the curious story of what happened when clinical psychologist Dorothy Rowe was interviewed for a BBC radio show about religion. She gave a 50 minute interview in which she said that religion was bad. The BBC, in their wisdom, edited this down to 2 minutes of audio which made her sound as if she was saying religion was good. She was annoyed, and complained. The BBC admitted that they'd misrepresented her and apologized. Naughty.

But that's not the point of this post. Because the BBC not only offered Rowe an apology, they also agreed to let her write about what she really believes and put it up on bbc.co.uk. Here is the result. Oh dear. It's, well, it's confused.

"Neuroscience proves the existence of free will" would be an extraordinary media headline, and, perhaps even more extraordinary, it would be true.

Although it is hardly mysterious that members of the public should find psychological research fascinating, this fascination seems particularly acute for findings that were obtained using a neuropsychological measure. Indeed, one can hardly open a newspaper’s science section without seeing a report on a neuroscience discovery or on a new application of neuroscience findings to economics, politics, or law. Research on nonneural cognitive psychology does not seem to pique the public’s interest in the same way, even though the two fields are concerned with similar questions.

Other kinds of information besides neuroscience could have similar effects. We focused the current experiments on neuroscience because it provides a particularly fertile testing ground, due to its current stature both in psychological research and in the popular press. However, we believe that our results are not necessarily limited to neuroscience or even to psychology. Rather, people may be responding to some more general property of the neuroscience information that encouraged them to find the explanations in the With Neuroscience condition more satisfying.

See also Lessons from the Placebo Gene. Also, if you like this kind of thing, see my other fMRI-curmudgeonry(1, 2)

The life of a neurocurmudgeon is a hard one, but once in a while, fate smiles upon us. This article in the Daily Telegraph neatly embodies several of the mistakes that people make about the brain, all in one bite-size portion.

The article is about a recent fMRI study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. 22 healthy Stanford student volunteers (half of them male) played a "video game" while being scanned. The game wasn't an actual game like Left 4 Dead(*), but rather a kind of very primitive cross between Pong and Risk, designed specifically for the purposes of the experiment:

Balls appeared on one-half of the screen from the side at 40 pixel/s, and 10 balls were constantly on the screen at any given time. One’s own space was defined as the space behind the wall and opposite side to where the balls appeared. The ball disappeared whenever clicked by the subject. Anytime a ball hit the wall before it could be clicked, the ball was removed and the wall moved at 20 pixel/s, making the space narrower. Anytime all the balls were at least 100 pixels apart from the wall ... the wall moved such that the space became wider.

Playing on computer consoles activates parts of the male brain which are linked to rewarding feelings and addiction, scans have shown. The more opponents they vanquish and points they score, the more stimulated this region becomes. In contrast, these parts of women's brains are much less likely to be triggered by sessions on the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii or Xbox.

Professor Allan Reiss of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford University, California, who led the research, said that women understood computer games just as well as men but did not have the same neurological drive to win.
"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on video games than females," he said.
"I think it's fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species – they're the males.
"Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory and aggression-type games."