Constance A. Cummings, Ph.D., is Project Director of the non-profit The Foundation for Psychocultural Research, which supports and advances interdisciplinary research and scholarship at the intersection of brain, mind, culture, and mental health and illness. She is co-editor (with Carol Worthman, Paul Plotsky, and Dan Schechter) of Formative Experiences: The Interaction of Caregiving, Culture, and Developmental Psychobiology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). She received her doctorate in theoretical linguistics from New York University.
Culture
1. Daniel Lende thoughtfully considers a recent issue of Anthropological Theory with special emphasis on neuroanthropology in his 6/29/12 post on “Franz Boas and Neuroanthropology.”
2. Daniel also has a great post and link to a talk by Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow (and Star Trek: The Next Gen writer, err, everyone knows that, right?) on his new book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior.
4. Wilson Will reviews Pamela Klassen’s Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity for Somatosphere. (This is a fascinating subject/review, but, Will also warns, for “those lured by the book’s cover image of a primitive surgical ward and expecting a treatment of liberal Christianity within the clinical context will find relatively little ethnographic detail about religion in the hospital setting; instead, they will have to wait for Wendy Cadge’s Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine, under contract with Chicago.”)
1. Sepulcre, Sabuncu, & Johnson’s “Network assemblies in the functional brain,” in August 2012 Curr Opinion Neurology: ”Functional connectivity MRI and corresponding analytical tools continue to reveal novel properties of the functional organization of the brain, which will in turn be key for understanding pathologies in neurology.”
2. Interview in July 6(?) Science with Laurence Steinberg on the (neuro)science behind Supreme Court’s ruling against mandatory life sentences for juveniles.
3. Review of Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck’s edited volume, Histories of Scientific Observation, which “includes a fascinating exploration of empathy in 20th-century psychoanalysis (Lunbeck).” (Lorraine Daston is also the co-author (with Katharine Park) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, a book of which I’m inordinately fond, about “the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world.”)
4. Mathalon and Ford’s May 2012 Neurobiology of schizophrenia: Search for the elusive correlation with symptoms in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience cites some well-known obstacles: “small samples, questionable reliability and validity of measurements, medication confounds, failure to distinguish state and trait effects, correlation–causation ambiguity, and the absence of compelling animal models of specific symptoms to test mechanistic hypotheses derived from brain-symptom correlations.”
[From Abstract] Here, I review . . . recent evidence and argue that, with 86 billion neurons and just as many nonneuronal cells, the human brain is a scaled-up primate brain in its cellular composition and metabolic cost, with a relatively enlarged cerebral cortex that does not have a relatively larger number of brain neurons yet is remarkable in its cognitive abilities and metabolism simply because of its extremely large number of neurons.
2. Two news items: In Kuala Lumpur: “Sword-wielding couple suffer from mental illness – police.” According to the 7/10/12 Sun Daily, “Khalil Afandi Hamid, 47, and the woman’s extremist religious beliefs might have caused them to run amok, initial police investigations have revealed.” Immediate thoughts of Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good’s already classic paper on this form of illness, “Why Do the Masses So Easily Run Amok? Madness and Violence in Indonesian Politics.” Latitudes 5:10-19 (June 2001).
4. Rhona MacDonald’s 7/9/12 post from PLoS Medicine on GlaxoSmithKline guilty plea to promoting antidepressants for unapproved uses. “Should complicit physicians remain unscathed?”
In many respects, our medical systems are best suited to diseases of the past, not those of the present or future. We must continue to adapt health systems and health policy as the burden of disease evolves. But we must also do more. Diseases can never be reduced to molecular pathways, mere technical problems requiring treatments or cures. Disease is a complex domain of human experience, involving explanation, expectation, and meaning. Doctors must acknowledge this complexity and formulate theories, practices, and systems that fully address the breadth and subtlety of disease.
1. Thanks to Greg Downey I am reading Cecilia Hayes in August 2012 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B theme issue on evolution of human cognition (including causal reasonining, imitation, language, metacognition, and theory of mind), which is described as a “much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed” with “crucial roles” for “cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene–culture co-evolution.”
The evolution of human cognition has not merely involved the addition of processes that supervise and control more primitive ways of thinking; it has accelerated an ancient trend towards increasingly powerful and coordinated “embodied” modes of thought [i.e., "thinking that is not fundamentally distinct from acting"].”
2. Also Greg’s latest (6/25/12) in Neuroanthropology: a really beautiful exploration of “Man-Sheep-Dog: Interspecies Social Skills,” which ties in with (1) by exemplifying humans’ domain-general and (with experience) domain-specific cognitive-develomental mechanisms. 3. Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology (6/24/12) takes a look at a new paper on the prisoner’s dilemma by William Press and Freeman Dyson in PNAS. For Daniel,
[t]he implications of this paper are fascinating. For biological evolution, it opens up new thinking about reproductive strategies and life history theory, as well as the direct impact on ideas about the evolution of cooperation.
For cultural evolution, it seems to provide some powerful insights into the evolution of inequality in human society. As the agriculture revolution and population growth led to the ability to monopolize social resources and create differential wealth, what happened with social class? Did human cooperation turn from fairness to enforcing the sort of unfair game that Press and Dyson outline?
4. Travis Saunders’s recap (“Is Obesity a Disease?”), exemplifies the problems of medicalization. On the one hand, medicalization can create stigma and diminish personhood; on the other, lack of medicalization can result in a dearth of qualified medical and emotional support for persons living with a health issue. For me the post was a useful reminder that most of the discussion about psychiatry in the media has centered on “bracket creep” of psychiatric diagnosis (over-medicalization) and not on the equally troubling lack of adequate systems of care for persons living with a chronic, severe psychiatric disorder (for UCLA pediatrician and science/policy researcher Neal Halfon [see below], “there is far too little education about the early signs of mental illness and what kinds of interventions can make a difference, and it can be difficult to find appropriate help for a troubled child or adolescent”).
5. This year’s brain series on Charlie Rose featured a segment on depression. Participants included UCLA’s Peter Whybrow, Eric Kandel (Columbia/Howard Hughes), Helen Mayberg (Emory) and Frederick Goodwin (George Washington University). The segment also included Andrew Solomon, who wrote a book about his experiences, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression ( 2001).
Like Elyn Sacks, Andrew Solomon is unusually eloquent about his illness experience in the segment and in his book and offers a lot of food for thought. Solomon describes his major depression as a gradual onset from within. Eventually, he came to live in a “slowed, paralyzed state” in which making lunch felt like the “stations of the cross.” (Even at the time, he recognized that this predicament was “ridiculous.”) What was particularly interesting was the way in which he described the experience in almost wholly physical terms as a loss of vital energy rather than, for example, a loss of happiness. The anxiety which followed the illness’s onset resembled “that moment when you slip and trip, before you actually hit the ground, that feeling of out-of-control terror” that lasts “day after day.” Overall, he felt that something external was bearing down on him and at the same time “something from inside had been removed.” What followed was a cyclical period of treatment (psychopharmaceuticals and psychotherapy), improvement, and relapse, which he experienced “over and over” until he recognized his illness as “diabetes-like,” organic and permanent, probably to the great relief of the panel. Yet Solomon gives us precisely what Clark Lawlor thinks biomedical psychiatry needs in his new book on the cultural history of depression (Oxford, 2012): “a more richly human and specific vision of this protean but very real illness.”
The panoply of cognitive, affective, motivational, and social functions that underpin everyday human experience requires precisely choreographed patterns of interaction between networked brain regions. Perhaps not surprisingly, diverse forms of psychopathology are characterized by breakdowns in these interregional relationships. Here, we discuss how functional brain imaging has provided insights into the nature of brain dysconnectivity in mental illness. Synthesizing work to date, we propose that genetic and environmental risk factors impinge upon systems-level circuits for several core dimensions of cognition, producing transdiagnostic symptoms. We argue that risk-associated disruption of these circuits mediates susceptibility to broad domains of psychopathology rather than discrete disorders.
The latest Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry includes three interesting articles (behind a paywall). The first is co-authored by Stephanie Drury (see the telomere paper above):
Neuroscience is moving toward a fairly unified explanation of psychopathology at the level of circuits and systems. The following articles/reviews on connectomics redirect our attention to mental illness as a disorder of connectivity. I’ve also embedded a foundational talk by Olaf Sporns, author of Networks of the Brain (MIT, 2010; reviewed by Terrence Sejnowski for American Scientist Online).
Recent advances in non-invasive neuroimaging have enabled the measurement of connections between distant regions in the living human brain, thus opening up a new field of research: Human connectomics. Different imaging modalities allow the mapping of structural connections (axonal fibre tracts) as well as functional connections (correlations in time series), and individual variations in these connections may be related to individual variations in behaviour and cognition. Connectivity analysis has already led to a number of new insights about brain organization. For example, segregated brain regions may be identified by their unique patterns of connectivity, structural and functional connectivity may be compared to elucidate how dynamic interactions arise from the anatomical substrate, and the architecture of large-scale networks connecting sets of brain regions may be analysed in detail. The combined analysis of structural and functional networks has begun to reveal components or modules with distinct patterns of connections that become engaged in different cognitive tasks. Collectively, advances in human connectomics open up the possibility of studying how brain connections mediate regional brain function and thence behaviour.
The panoply of cognitive, affective, motivational, and social functions that underpin everyday human experience requires precisely choreographed patterns of interaction between networked brain regions. Perhaps not surprisingly, diverse forms of psychopathology are characterized by breakdowns in these interregional relationships. Here, we discuss how functional brain imaging has provided insights into the nature of brain dysconnectivity in mental illness. Synthesizing work to date, we propose that genetic and environmental risk factors impinge upon systems-level circuits for several core dimensions of cognition, producing transdiagnostic symptoms. We argue that risk-associated disruption of these circuits mediates susceptibility to broad domains of psychopathology rather than discrete disorders.
The brain is expensive, incurring high material and metabolic costs for its size — relative to the size of the body — and many aspects of brain network organization can be mostly explained by a parsimonious drive to minimize these costs. However, brain networks or connectomes also have high topological efficiency, robustness, modularity and a ‘rich club’ of connector hubs. Many of these and other advantageous topological properties will probably entail a wiring-cost premium. We propose that brain organization is shaped by an economic trade-off between minimizing costs and allowing the emergence of adaptively valuable topological patterns of anatomical or functional connectivity between multiple neuronal populations. This process of negotiating, and re-negotiating, trade-offs between wiring cost and topological value continues over long (decades) and short (millisecond) timescales as brain networks evolve, grow and adapt to changing cognitive demands. An economical analysis of neuropsychiatric disorders highlights the vulnerability of the more costly elements of brain networks to pathological attack or abnormal development.
Psychiatric disorders are phenotypically heterogeneous entities with a complex genetic basis. To mitigate this complexity, many investigators study so-called intermediate phenotypes (IPs) that putatively provide a more direct index of the physiological effects of candidate genetic risk variants than overt psychiatric syndromes. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a particularly popular technique for measuring such phenotypes because it allows interrogation of diverse aspects of brain structure and function in vivo. Much of this work however, has focused on relatively simple measures that quantify variations in the physiology or tissue integrity of specific brain regions in isolation, contradicting an emerging consensus that most major psychiatric disorders do not arise from isolated dysfunction in one or a few brain regions, but rather from disturbed interactions within and between distributed neural circuits; i.e., they are disorders of brain connectivity. The recent proliferation of new MRI techniques for comprehensively mapping the entire connectivity architecture of the brain, termed the human connectome, has provided a rich repertoire of tools for understanding how genetic variants implicated in mental disorder impact distinct neural circuits. In this article, we review research using these connectomic techniques to understand how genetic variation influences the connectivity and topology of human brain networks. We highlight recent evidence from twin and imaging genetics studies suggesting that the penetrance of candidate risk variants for mental illness, such as those in SLC6A4, MAOA,ZNF804A, and APOE, may be higher for IPs characterized at the level of distributed neural systems than at the level of spatially localized brain regions. The findings indicate that imaging connectomics provides a powerful framework for understanding how genetic risk for psychiatric disease is expressed through altered structure and function of the human connectome.
Schizophrenia is frequently characterized as a disorder of brain connectivity. Neuroimaging has played a central role in supporting this view, with nearly two decades of research providing abundant evidence of structural and functional connectivity abnormalities in the disorder. In recent years, our understanding of how schizophrenia affects brain networks has been greatly advanced by attempts to map the complete set of inter-regional interactions comprising the brain’s intricate web of connectivity; i.e., the human connectome. Imaging connectomics refers to the use of neuroimaging techniques to generate these maps which, combined with the application of graph theoretic methods, has enabled relatively comprehensive mapping of brain network connectivity and topology in unprecedented detail. Here, we review the application of these techniques to the study of schizophrenia, focusing principally on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research, while drawing attention to key methodological issues in the field. The published findings suggest that schizophrenia is associated with a widespread and possibly context-independent functional connectivity deficit, upon which are superimposed more circumscribed, context-dependent alterations associated with transient states of hyper- and/or hypo-connectivity. In some cases, these changes in inter-regional functional coupling dynamics can be related to measures of intra-regional dysfunction. Topological disturbances of functional brain networks in schizophrenia point to reduced local network connectivity and modular structure, as well as increased global integration and network robustness. Some, but not all, of these functional abnormalities appear to have an anatomical basis, though the relationship between the two is complex. By comprehensively mapping connectomic disturbances in patients with schizophrenia across the entire brain, this work has provided important insights into the highly distributed character of neural abnormalities in the disorder, and the potential functional consequences that these disturbances entail.
The combination of advanced neuroimaging techniques and major developments in complex network science, have given birth to a new framework for studying the brain: “connectomics.” This framework provides the ability to describe and study the brain as a dynamic network and to explore how the coordination and integration of information processing may occur. In recent years this framework has been used to investigate the developing brain and has shed light on many dynamic changes occurring from infancy through adulthood. The aim of this article is to review this work and to discuss what we have learned from it. We will also use this body of work to highlight key technical aspects that are necessary in general for successful connectome analysis using today’s advanced neuroimaging techniques. We look to identify current limitations of such approaches, what can be improved, and how these points generalize to other topics in connectome research.
Real-world complex systems may be mathematically modeled as graphs, revealing properties of the system. Here we study graphs of functional brain organization in healthy adults using resting state functional connectivity MRI. We propose two novel brain-wide graphs, one of 264 putative functional areas, the other a modification of voxelwise networks that eliminates potentially artificial short-distance relationships. These graphs contain many subgraphs in good agreement with known functional brain systems. Other subgraphs lack established functional identities; we suggest possible functional characteristics for these subgraphs. Further, graph measures of the areal network indicate that the default mode subgraph shares network properties with sensory and motor subgraphs: it is internally integrated but isolated from other subgraphs, much like a “processing” system. The modified voxelwise graph also reveals spatial motifs in the patterning of systems across the cortex.
In the past decade, imaging genetics has evolved into a highly successful neuroimaging discipline with a variety of sophisticated research tools. To date, several neural systems mechanisms have been identified that mediate genetic risk for mental disorders linked to common candidate and genome-wide-supported variants. In particular, the examination of intermediate connectivity phenotypes has recently gained increasing popularity. This paper gives an overview of the scientific methods and evidence that link indices of neural network organization to the genetic susceptibility for mental illness with a focus on the effects of candidate genes and genome-wide supported risk variants on brain structure and function.
NOTE: I’ve posted four hour-long videos this week. If time doesn’t permit, I’d suggest listening to the Robert Sapolsky videos on depression and schizophrenia, maybe in your car on your way to work or finally taking that drive across the country. You couldn’t have more excellent company on a road trip!
Culture
1. I really enjoyed historian Jesse Ballenger’s first post on his new blog, To Conquer Confusion: A Historian’s Perspective on the Science and Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia, entitled: “Blogging and Dementia: Why This Blog.” I think blogging is a good way to throw some light on the curious contents of our “work” minds in process. (Like archeologists, we should “embrace the messiness” and, in Ballenger’s case, ambivalence.) But Ballenger also grapples with an important question, “how can choking the virtual world with one more blog possibly be an act of communicative meaning?”
3. The Ethnographer’s guide to big data, part 1 and part 2. Jenna Burrell’s dispatch from the DataEdge conference hosted by UC Berkeley’s School of Information.
1. I liked neuroscientist Bradley Voytek’s 6/16/12 post “Defending Jonah Lehrer,” which describes some critical issues regarding imaging (and also captures some of the angst surrounding the popularization of research by “non-experts”).
2. Vittorio Gallese (mirror neurons) YouTube video on “The Body in Aesthetic Experience: A Neuroscientific Perspective” from Berkeley’s Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. The talk focuses on his interdisciplinary approach to intersubjectivity and social cognition.
3. Apologies for posting TWO lengthy videos, but I loved Mario Biagioli’s book, Galileo, Courtier, so I had to post HIS Berkeley STMS talk, “Secrecy and Openness Revisited: A Genealogy of Priority in Science.”
5. Andreas Bartels’ commentary in July 2012 Neuropsychopharmacology, “Oxytocin and the Social Brain: Beware the Complexity,” one of the lessons of which is, “we need to find clever ways to present social stimuli in truly social context.”
Psychiatry
1. The is almost the all-video edition of 3×5, but Robert Sapolsky’s talk on depression is worth hearing. I agree with a commentator who described it as: “Absolute genius. Elegant, simplified without being simplistic, and cohesive.”
[The Cybernetic Brain] explores the largely forgotten group of British thinkers—Bateson included—that tripped the light fantastic at the frontiers of psychiatry, systems management, politics, epistemology, and Eastern thought as the twentieth century came of age. In the excerpt that follows below, he locates Bateson’s ideas on schizophrenia and enlightenment alongside Western appreciations of Zen, as a form of what Foucault might call “gymnastics of the soul.”
5. Wonderful Emily Martin 3/15/12 lecture at Science, Technology, Medicine & Society (Berkeley), “Steps Toward an Anthropology of the Human Subject in Experimental Psychology,” which begins by describing the rich, entwined history of psych/anthro field expeditions: ”The expedition scientists assumed that the social and cultural environment determined the way the mind perceived the world. (That’s pretty radical. . . . Eighteen-ninety-eight.) They also assumed that after immersion in the daily life of villagers . . . they could serve as appropriate experimental subjects, comparable to the native inhabitants.”
2. Jeremy Holmes, former chair of the Faculty of Psychotherapy, Royal College of Psychiatrists in BJ Psych on “Psychodynamic Psychiatry’s Green Shoots.” One example the author discusses is the Scandinavian “needs adapted” approach to schizophrenia, whereby “ the uniqueness of each patient is recognised, medication kept to a minimum, the family dynamics around psychosis charted, and a long-term one-to-one relationship with a key-worker seen as vital to improvement.” See also Alanen et al., Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Schizophrenia Psychosis: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, 2009).
It is something relatively new in psychiatry. One may assume that we consider psychosis as psychogenic disorders, and that we do not consider anatomical and physiological causation. This is a misunderstanding … Anatomy and physiology remain two major basics of psychiatry. But we think that the phenomena traditional psychiatry cannot understand in logical terms have to be considered by using other approaches.
A few weeks ago I attended the first annual meeting of the One Mind for Research Campaign: Curing Brain Disease. (The group’s new CEO is Ret. General Peter Chiarelli, the commanding officer of the 1st Cavalry Division during the Iraq War, and you could practically taste the battle dust in your mouth at the end of the 3-day offensive to eliminate brain disease and its stigma within 10 years.) The meeting, which included NIMH director Thomas Insel, former NIMH director Steven Hyman, and American Psychiatric Association newly elected president John Oldham, featured sessions on the latest psychiatric neuroscience, stigma, and the aging brain. Here are some highlights:
Heterogeneity
One non-surprising take-home message is that psychiatric disorders are not only heterogeneous but many (most?) may eventually be best characterized at the level of circuits/systems. Regarding heterogeneity, the consensus among several speakers was that patients classified as having one illness or another should be further “stratified” as much as possible in order to treat with different neurodeficit-specific compounds (which is interestingly contrary to some of the proposed changes to DSM-5, such as lumping Asperger’s and Autism, or eliminating subtypes of schizophrenia). UPDATE (8/24/12) This statement requires clarification. The elimination of subtypes in schizophrenia (paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, undifferentiated, etc.) is due to the belief that the disorder’s clinical heterogeneity may be best understood by using a single diagnosis with distinct symptom “dimensions” of psychopathology – hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, abnormal psychomotor behavior, negative symptoms (restricted emotional expression or avolition), impaired cognition, depression, mania – each of which, it is proposed, would be measured on a 4-point severity scale. But it’s important to note that these dimensions, or “domains,” will “cross diagnostic boundaries” introducing a new set of challenges, especially for drug development (Carpenter, 2012).
Here’s an example of why categories can be confounding. ReneHen gave a fascinating talk on a hippocampus-related process – pattern separation, the way in which our brains are able to reduce “the average overlap between two representations, thus making similar representations more distinct or orthogonalized in order to afford rapid learning without inducing interference and retrieval errors,” which is balanced by pattern completion. Pattern separation is impaired in PTSD as well as schizophrenia.
Connectivity
But I noticed that interest in the intermediate phenotype concept prevalent in psychiatric neuroscience literature during the last decade is now accompanied by an interest in big science, e.g., fresh efforts (reminiscent of Galen’s rete mirabile) to understand structural and functional connections within and across regions of the brain that are, also, exquisitely sensitive to environmental interactions. And this has significant treatment implications. As Emory fear scientist KerryRessler remarked, “we have to change how we think about therapy, the brain is not a bag of molecules that can be treated by a drug.”
MIT computational neuroscientist and TED pundit SebastianSeung (“I am my connectome”) has received a lot of attention in the popular press recently for his work on the connectivity of individual neurons. (According to Seung, the dynamic or functional connectivity of neurons and the white-matter structural “connectome” interact in much the same way water rushing down a mountainside and the terrain over which it flows do.) But one of the most exciting sessions at the conference featured the work of OlafSporns and colleagues, who are focusing on structural and functional connectivity at the macro-scale, based on the concept of brain networks. These investigations rely on diffusion imaging (for structural connectivity) and resting state fMRI (for functional connectivity). In his talk, Sporns likened these anatomical connections to complex social or other kinds of networks that exist in the world. (“A common language is emerging,” said Sporns, one that is able to link network interactions within and across multiple levels of organization, which he referred to as “network science.”) Focusing on these interactions seems a little more doable than trying to link objective biomarkers to subjective experience (which Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks likened to counting commas in a poem).
In the same session, WilliamSeeley gave a fascinating talk on the connectional architecture of neurodegeneration in brain disorders, including Alzheimer’s, each of which has a distinct pattern. His group found, for example, that resting-state connectivity patterns of healthy brains related to episodic memory using fMRI mirrored the atrophy patterns in Alzheimer’s as the disease progressed from the medial temporal lobe to the neocortex. (The more radical idea (that may be reappearing in the science), another speaker said, is that these disorders are connectopathic and initially triggered by rogue proteins.) Here’s a link to the relevant Neuron 2012 paper.
Stigma
In the session on stigma, ElynSaks (USC), author of The Center Cannot Hold, discussed the “positive, negative, and cognitive” dimensions of schizophrenia, in regard to the latter dimensions specifically referring to short-term memory, visuo-spatial abilities, etc. She discussed how she was able to balance borderline impairment in some areas of cognition, e.g., short-term memory, by leveraging her strengths and “passed” for many years in academia as “normal.” During the talk I was struck by Dr. Saks’s certainty that psychotherapy is the reason for her lack of negative symptoms, which made me wonder, just how correlated are these symptoms with a person’s level of social disconnection? (The social neuroscience in this area by NaomiEisenberger – who just published a review in Nature – and others relating social disconnection to some of the same pathways as physical pain is really interesting in this regard.)
Unfortunately, stigma is “alive and well,” according to sociologist BernicePescosolido, who spoke eloquently around the depressing fact that despite huge leaps in scientists’ neurobiological understanding of mental illness, despite the disappearance by the rest of us into what Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good calls the “biotechnical embrace” re matters of the mind, there has been virtually no change in Americans’ level of prejudice regarding persons whom NYU anthropologist Emily Martin refers to as living under the description of a mental disorder. We just don’t believe it’s a disease like any other, and if you or your family have the rotten luck to be on the receiving end, this adds astronomically to the confusion, anxiety, and fear about which neuroanthropologist Greg Downey has so eloquently written ( “Slipping into Psychosis”).
Alzheimer’s and the Fountain of Youth
But I don’t want to end this post on such a depressing note. Stanford researcherTonyWyss-Coray discussed the importance of not seeing the brain as an isolated organ. His group is studying the effects of stress, inflammation, and other environmental insults on brain function. In one experiment, the investigators infused the blood of young mice into old mice, and there were many positive effects in terms of neurogenesis, increased synaptic activity, increased spine density, reduced neuroinflammation, and improved spatial memory. (This announcement initiated a small wave of mouse jokes.) A brilliant neuroscientist sittling behind me said in a vaguely accented English (seriously) that it would be a difficult and expensive process to determine which substances within the blood to focus on; in the meantime, why not just transfuse old people with young people’s plasma? This is precisely what John Huston, playing a Joseph Kennedy-esque character, does in the movie Winter Kills (“I get it from the kids up at Amherst”). As the general concluded, “What I’ve learned among other things is that, THIS IS A GOOD TIME TO BE A MOUSE.”
1. “What Makes Something Ethnographic?” Carole McGranahan’s 5/31/12 post on Savage Minds summarizes her experience teaching a new undergraduate course. (The group eventually came up with their own 9-item list.)
2. And that list reminded me of the conclusion in “Ways of Looking at Ethnographic Film,” an edited excerpt – from “Seeing Anthropology” by Karl Heider et al. – available on TV Multiversity.
2. Karl Deisseroth’s “Optogenetics and Psychiatry: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities,” introducing the 6/15/12 special issue of Biological Psychiatry. “Why is optogenetics so important to psychiatry,” you may ask? Because “one of [its] unique and most versatile features . . . is well aligned with what may be a core feature of psychiatric disease (altered function along pathways of neural communication).”
3. Proust wasn’t a neuroscientist, and neither is Jonah Leher (who as of today is a staff writer at The New Yorker, here’s link to the new home of Frontal Cortex). An old, but very rich post + commentary, which may make you want to revisit the post by Kate Clancy and commentary/discussion between Kate Clancy and Daniel Lende on interdisciplinary graduate education. Would an anthropologist who spends a year in an imaging lab qualify?
4. One of Bradley Voytek’s favorite TED talks (by Oliver Sacks), “What hallucination reveals about our minds.” (Speaking of which, the makers of Prometheus nailed the genre, including the annoying cadence.)
5. Scicurious masterfully unpacks a paper by Volkow et al. on sleep deprivation in 6/4/12 Sciam.
Psychiatry
1. “Our New Era of Anxiety,” an excerpt from Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield’s new book, “All We Have to Fear,” in 6/2/12 Salon.
BONUS: This year I participated in the consistently wonderful meetings hosted by UCLA’s Mind, Medicine, and Culture interdisciplinary discussion group, which is led by Carole Browner, Linda Garro, Doug Hollan, and Jason Throop. It’s definitely worth it to join the list-serve when MMAC resumes next Fall.
1. Vaughan Bell has two posts on MRI. “The Trouble with Brain Scans” (5/26/12) which appeared in The Observer, and the followup “A Bridge Over Troubled Waters for fMRI,” which he posted to his blog. He is also the master of metaphors that are good for thinking with: psychiatric disorders are like literary genres (see below), voxels (imaging science’s unit of analysis) are like roulette wheels (“ideally, the analysis should separate roulette wheels from genuine activity”).
2. Psychologist Gary Marcus, writing in the The New Yorker (“The Web Gets Smarter”), argues that “in a decade or two, scientists and journalists may well look back at this moment as the dividing line between machines that dredged massive amounts of data—with no clue what that data meant—and machines that started to think, just a little bit, like people.”
4. Are prions at the root of some neuropsychiatric disorders? (Does this instigate a subsequent “connectopathy?)” Re former, see Claudio Soto’s “Transmissible Proteins: Expanding the Prion Heresy” (5/25/12) in Cell.
2. Former marine Mike Scotto’s 5/28/12 opinion piece in the New York Times, “The V.A.’s Shameful Betrayal” about veterans’ inadequate mental health care, and ongoing struggle with stigma.
My five favorite reads for week of 14–21 May 2012:
Culture
1. Greg Downey of Neuroanthropology: “Not Allowed to Have a Small Heart: Tourette Syndrome.” May 15 – June 15 is Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month and Greg has written a beautiful post about the neuropsychiatric disorder, which includes a review of Rob Lemelson’s deeply moving ethnographic film, The Bird Dancer.
4. Also in PNAS, emotion related circuitry in young children (I recently heard one of the co-authors, Lucina Uddin of Stanford, give an interesting talk about functional connectivity with implications for autism at UCLA): http://www.pnas.org/content/109/20/7941.short?rss=1.
5. Finally, there is a great review on shared neurosubstrates by Naomi Eisenberger in the June 2012 issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience: ”The pain of social disconnection.”
3. Jones, Rahman, and Everitt’s fascinating paper on psychiatric diagnosis at Maudsley Hospital 1924-1935 in latest History of Psychiatry isabout an era “before classification systems were tested for reliability” and “diagnosis was fluid, reflecting changing hypotheses about causation, pathology and treatment.”
4. In case you’re thinking of buying, here’s a pdf of Catharine Coleborne’s review of Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Mueller’s Transnational Psychiatries: Social and Cultural Histories of Psychiatry in Comparative Perspective c. 1800-2000.
5. Finally, in response to my post on the DSM-5, George Dawson suggested I read Justin Marley’s passionate rebuttal of Edward Shorter’s blog post in SCIAM. I did before and have done so again! I’d recommend both (but I’m totally Team Shorter on this) – as well as the McHugh & Slavney commentary in NEJM mentioned above.
Tania Singer’s Neuroimage review published online 1/28/12: “The past, present and future of social neuroscience: A European perspective,” in which “the use of a multi-method and multi-disciplinary research approach combining genetic, pharmacological, computational and developmental aspects is advocated and future directions for the study of interactive minds are discussed.”
In a postscript, Eugene added a link to “Hacking’s own most recent updating of his ‘making up people’ concept … “Kinds of People: Moving Targets,” where he rejects what he calls his own earlier attempts to retain a notion of ‘natural kinds.’”
