The Links Between Creativity and Insanity

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we’re starting to understand why. Roger Dobson reports.

 

By Roger Dobson / Source: The Independent

 

At first glance, Einstein, Salvador Dali, Tony Hancock, and Beach Boy Brian Wilson would seem to have little in common. Their areas of physics, modern art, comedy, and rock music are light years apart.

 

So what, if anything, could possibly link minds that gave the world the theory of relativity, great surreal art, iconic comedy, and songs about surfing?

 

According to new research, psychosis could be the answer. Creative minds in all kinds of areas, from science to poetry, and mathematics to humour, may have traits associated with psychosis. Such traits may allow the unusual and sometimes bizarre thought processes associated with mental illness to fuel creativity.

 

The theory is based on the idea that there is no clear dividing line between the healthy and the mentally ill. Rather, there is a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits without having the debilitating symptoms.

 

Mental illnesses have been around for thousands of years. Evolutionary theory suggests that in order for them to be still here, there must be some kind of survival advantage to them. If they were wholly bad, it’s argued, natural selection would have seen them off long ago. In some cases the advantage is clear.

 

Anxiety, for example, can be a mental illness with severe symptoms and consequences, but it is also a trait that at a non-clinical level has survival advantages. In healthy proportions, it keeps us alert and on our toes when threats are sensed.

 

It’s now increasingly being argued that there are survival advantages to others forms of illness, too, because of the links between the traits associated with them and creativity.

 

“It can be difficult for people to reconcile mental illness with the idea that traits may not be disabling. While people accept that there are health benefits to anxiety, they are more wary of schizophrenia and manic depression,” says Professor Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University, who has edited a special edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, looking at the links between mental illness and creativity. “There is now a feeling that these traits have survived because they have some adaptive value. To be mildly manic depressive or mildly schizophrenic brings a flexibility of thought, an openness, and risk-taking behaviour, which does have some adaptive value in creativity. The price paid for having those traits is that some will have mental illness.”

 

Research is providing support for the idea that creative people are more likely to have traits associated with mental illness. One study found that the incidence of mood disorders, suicide and institutionalisation to be 20 times higher among major British and Irish poets in the 200 years up to 1800.

 

Other studies have shown that psychiatric patients perform better in tests of abstract thinking. Another study, based on 291 eminent and creative men in different fields, found that 69 per cent had a mental disorder of some kind. Scientists were the least affected, while artists and writers had increased diagnoses of psychosis.

 

“Most theorists agree that it is not the full-blown illness itself, but the milder forms of psychosis that are at the root of the association between creativity and madness,” says Emilie Glazer, experimental psychologist and author of one of the Oxford journal papers. “The underlying traits linked with mild psychopathology enhance creative ability. In severe form, they are debilitating.”

 

Research is also showing that traits associated with different mental illnesses have different effects on creativity. The creativity needed to develop the theory of relativity, is, for example, very different from that required for producing surreal paintings, or poetry.

 

Research is now homing in on whether the psychosis that is linked to different types of creativity comes through schizophrenia and schizotypy traits, through manic-depressive or cyclothymic traits, or traits associated with the autism and Asperger’s disorders.

 

A study at the University of Newcastle found significant differences between artistically creative people and mathematicians. While the artists showed schizotypy traits, mathematicians did not, and that fits in with the idea that mathematics and engineering, which require attention to detail, are closer to the autistic traits than to psychosis.

 

“Affective disorder perpetuates creativity limited to the normal,” says Glazer, “while the schizoid person is predisposed to a sense of detachment from the world, free from social boundaries and able to consider alternative frameworks, producing creativity within the revolutionary sphere. Newton and Einstein’s schizotypal orientation, for instance, enabled their revolutionary stamp in the sciences.”

 

The stereotypical images of mad scientists working alone and preferring foaming beakers to friends, abound in literature, and reflect a popular perception of the aloof, detached and obsessive genius. But the idea goes back even further. 2000 years ago in Rome, the philosopher Seneca was obviously already on the case when he wrote: “There is no great genius without a tincture of madness.”

 

 

It’s no joke: Comedians and depression

 

Heard the one about the man who went to the doctor to get help for his depression? He’s told to go and see a show with a well known comedian who would make him laugh and lift his spirits. “But that’s me,” says the patient. “I’m the comedian.”

 

The joke, related by Rod Martin, author of ‘The Psychology of Humor – An Integrative Approach’, is apparently something of a favourite among comedians, who are known to be prone to depression, from the late Tony Hancock and Spike Milligan, to Stephen Fry and Paul Merton.

 

One theory is that humour is developed in response to depression, and that it works as a coping mechanism. One study, reported by Martin, looked at 55 male and 14 female comedians, all famous and successful. It found that comedians tended to be superior in intelligence, angry, suspicious, and depressed.

 

In addition, their early lives were characterised by suffering, isolation, and feelings of deprivation, and, he says, they used humour as a defence against anxiety, converting their feel ings of suppressed rage from physical to verbal aggression. “The comedic skills required for a successful career may well be developed as a means of compensating for earlier psychological losses and difficulties,” says Martin. A second study did not find higher levels, although comedians had significantly greater preoccupation with themes of good and evil, unworthiness, self-deprecation, and duty and responsibility.

 

“A significant proportion of comedians do seem to suffer more with depression,” says Professor Gordon Claridge, emeritus professor of abnormal psychology at Oxford University. “Comedy seems to act as a way of dealing with depression. I think there is an emotionality and cognitive style that goes along with these depressive disorders which seems to feed creativity.”

 

Salvador Dali was not just a great artist. He also met the criteria for several psychosis diagnoses, a mixture of schizophrenic and depressive. He may also have been paranoid, as well having antisocial, histrionic, and narcissistic disorders. “Dalí and his contribution to the history of art highlights that abnormality is not necessarily disagreeable – or to be so readily dismissed as a sign of neurological disease. For without his instability, Dalí may not have created the great art that he did,” says Caroline Murphy of Oxford.

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8 Brain Diseases That Give Superhuman Mind Powers

Source: AutoAdvice.com

 

1. Photographic Memory

 

We have all heard of people with so called “photographic memories”. Usually we use it when referring to someone who has an above average ability to recall information about the past or about their surroundings. True photographic memory of the kind exhibited by Stephen Wiltshire is truly a rare but amazing gift. Mr. Wiltshire is an autistic savant and those that know him call him “the living camera”. When he was 11 years old he drew a perfect representation of the aerial view of London after a single helicopter ride, down to the correct number of windows on the major buildings of the city. This is perhaps one of the coolest feats of the human brain I have ever seen.

 

 

2. Tertiary Neurosyphilis

 

Tertiary neurosyphilis, is the most interesting form of syphilis from a cultural point of view. Just before the onset of paralysis, the sufferer is beset with delusions of grandeur, a sense of understanding everything, a sense that he is on the verge of some monumental discovery which will forever change the course of history, as well as a sense that some divine electricity is coursing through his veins.

 

Since in this preliminary stage of tertiary syphilis, powers of expression are not impaired, a syphilitic who is also an artist may well produce a work of art that reflects this state of mind or, rather, this state of brain. Bob Summers felt that “King of Tetch” was just this kind of work. Wilhelm Reich felt that he had unlocked the secrets of the universe with the discovery of orgone energy, something that could now be accumulated in his orgone boxes, which would make power stations unnecessary. Hayden feels that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was composed under these circumstances, after syphilis had destroyed Beethoven’s hearing and was in the process of destroying his brain as well. “Seid umschlungen Millionen!” The grandiosity of Schiller’s poem is matched by the grandiosity of Beethoven’s musical score, which, at least in terms of the Ode to Joy chorus, is based on a moronic melody (melody was never Beethoven’s strong suit anyway), as the film Dearly Beloved makes clear. The brain of the syphilitic approaching general paralysis of the insane is like the light bulb that grows brighter just before it burns out completely. The syphilitic experiences, in Hayden’s words,

 

“episodes of creative euphoria, electrified, joyous energy when grandiosity led to a new vision. The heightened perception, dazzling insights, and almost mystical knowledge experienced during this time were expressed while precision of form of expression was still possible. At the end of the 19th century, it was believed that, in rare instances, syphilis could produce genius.”

 

3. Synesthesia

 

Synesthesia can occur between nearly any two senses or perceptual modes. While nearly every possible combination of experiences is logically possible, several types are more common than others.

 

Grapheme – color synesthesia

How someone with synesthesia might perceive (not ’see’) certain letters and numbers.How someone with synesthesia might perceive (not “see”) certain letters and numbers.

 

In one of the most common forms of synesthesia, grapheme – color synesthesia, individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes), are “shaded” or “tinged” with a color. While no two synesthetes will report the same colors for all letters and numbers, studies of large numbers of synesthetes find that there are some commonalities across letters (e.g., A is likely to be red).

 

Music – color synesthesia

In music – color synesthesia, individuals experience colors in response to tones or other aspects of musical stimuli (e.g., timbre or key). Like grapheme – color synesthesia, there is rarely agreement amongst synesthetes that a given tone will be a certain color, but individuals are internally consistent. Tested months later, synesthetes will report the same experiences as they had previously reported.

Color changes in response to pitch may involve more than just the hue of the color. Lightness (the amount of black in a color; red with black may appear brown), saturation (the intensity of the color; candy red is highly saturated, while pink is almost unsaturated), and hue may all be affected to varying degrees. Additionally, music ? color synesthetes, unlike grapheme – color synesthetes, often report that the colors move, or stream into and out of their field of view.

 

 

4. Savantism without major autistic impairments.

 

Daniel Paul Tammet is a British autistic savant gifted with a facility for mathematics problems, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy.

 

Experiencing numbers as colors or sensations is a well-documented form of synesthesia, but Tammet is unique in how specific and detailed his mental imagery of numbers is. He claims that in his mind each number, up to 10,000, has its own unique shape and feel, and he can “sense” whether a number is prime or composite and “see” results of calculations as landscapes in his mind. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful.

 

Tammet holds the European record for memorizing and recounting pi to 22,514 digits in just over five hours. This sponsored charity challenge was held in aid of the National Society for Epilepsy (NSE) on “Pi Day,” 14 March 2004 at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, UK. The NSE was chosen to benefit from this event because of Daniel’s experience with epilepsy as a young child. Professor Allan Snyder at the Australian National University said of Tammet: “Savants can’t usually tell us how they do what they do. It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That’s why he’s exciting. He could be the ‘Rosetta Stone.’”

 

5. Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

 

People with temporal lobe epilepsy experience the world in a drastically different way from the average person. The first researcher to note and catalog the abnormal experiences associated with TLE was neurologist Norman Geschwind, who noted a constellation of symptoms, including hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, fainting spells, mutism and pedantism, often collectively ascribed to a condition known as Geschwind syndrome. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran explored the neural basis of the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE using galvanic skin response, which measures emotional arousal, to determine whether the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE was due to an overall enhanced emotional response, or if the enhancement was specfic to religious stimuli.

 

6. Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIPA)

 

Congenital insensitivity to pain (or congenital analgia) is a rare condition where a child cannot feel (and has never felt) physical pain. Cognition and sensation is otherwise normal, for instance they can still feel discriminative touch (though not always temperature), and there is no detectable physical abnormality.These children often suffer oral cavity damage (such as having bitten off the tip of their tongue) or fractures to bones. Unnoticed infections, and corneal damage due to foreign objects in the eye are also seen.

 

7. Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS)

 

Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome results in a spontaneous and persistent genital arousal, with or without orgasm or genital engorgement, unrelated to any feelings of sexual desire. It was first documented by Dr. Sandra Leiblum in 2001, only recently characterized as a distinct syndrome in medical literature. In particular, it is not related to hypersexuality, sometimes known as nymphomania or satyriasis. In addition to being very rare the condition is also frequently unreported by sufferers who may consider it shameful or embarrassing.

 

Physical arousal caused by this syndrome can be very intense and persist for extended periods, days or weeks at a time. Orgasm can sometimes provide temporary relief, but within hours the symptoms return. The symptoms can be debilitating, preventing concentration on mundane tasks. Some situations, such as riding in an automobile or train, vibrations from mobile phones, and even going to the toilet can aggravate the syndrome unbearably.

 

8. Hypergraphia

 

Hypergraphia is an overwhelming urge to write. It is not itself a disorder, but can be associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy and mania. Several different regions of the brain govern the act of writing. The physical movement of the hand is controlled by the cerebral cortex which comprises part of the outer layer of the brain. The drive to write, on the other hand, is controlled by the limbic system, a ring-shaped cluster of cells deeply buried in the cortex which governs emotion, affiliated instincts and inspiration and is said to regulate the human being’s need for communication. Words and ideas are cognized and understood by the temporal lobes behind the ears, and these temporal lobes are connected to the limbic system. Ideas are organized and edited in the frontal lobe of the brain. Temporal lobe lesions cause temporal lobe epilepsy, however it is also known to run in families. Hypergraphia is not a frequent manifestation of temporal lobe epilepsy.

 

As of current, hypergraphia is understood to be triggered by changes in brainwave activity in the temporal lobe.

 

This article was originally published at AutoAdvice.com with links to more references and video clips.

 

 

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10 Mind-Boggling Psychiatric Treatments

By Dan Greenberg

Source: Mental Floss Magazine

 

Nobody ever claimed a visit to the doctor was a pleasant way to pass the time. But if you’re timid about diving onto a psychiatrist’s couch or paranoid about popping pills, remember: It could be worse. Like getting-a-hole-drilled-into-your-skull worse. Or having-a-doctor-infect-you-with-malaria-to-cure-you worse. Think of it this way. After finding out what’s not going to happen to you, that couch is going to start looking a lot more comfortable.

 

1) INSULIN-COMA THERAPY

 

The coma-therapy trend began in 1927. Viennese physician Manfred Sakel accidentally gave one of his diabetic patients an insulin overdose, and it sent her into a coma. But what could have been a major medical faux pas turned into a triumph. The woman, a drug addict, woke up and declared her morphine craving gone. Then Sakel (who really isn’t earning our trust here) made the same mistake with another patient, who also woke up claiming to be cured.

 

Before long, Sakel was intentionally testing the therapy with other patients and reporting a 90 percent recovery rate, particularly among schizophrenics. Strangely, however, Sakel’s treatment success remains a mystery. Presumably, a big dose of insulin causes blood sugar levels to plummet, which starves the brain of food and sends the patient into a coma. But why this unconscious state would help psychiatric patients is anyone’s guess.

 

Regardless, the popularity of insulin therapy faded, mainly because it was dangerous. Slipping into a coma is no walk in the park, and between one and two percent of treated patients died as a result.

 

2) TREPANATION

 

Ancient life was not without its hazards. Between wars, drunken duels, and the occasional run-in with an inadequately domesticated pig, it’s no surprise that archaic skulls tend to have big holes in them.

 

But not all holes are created with equal abandon. Through the years, archaeologists have uncovered skulls marked by a carefully cut circular gap, which shows signs of being made long before the owner of the head passed away. These fractures were no accident; they were the result one of the earliest forms of psychiatric treatment called trepanation .

 

The basic theory behind this “therapy” holds that insanity is caused by demons lurking inside the skull. Boring a hole in the patient’s head creates a door through which the demons can escape, and – viola! – out goes the crazy. Despite the peculiarity of the theory and lack of major-league anesthetics, trepanation was by no means a limited phenomenon. From the Neolithic era to the early 20th century, cultures all over the world used it was way to cure patients of their ills.

 

Doctors eventually phased out the practice as less, er, invasive procedures were developed. Average Joes, on the other hand, didn’t follow suit. Trepanation patrons still exist. In fact, they even have their own organizations – and websites! Check out the International Trepanation Advocacy Group at www.trepan.com if you’re still curious.

 

3) ROTATIONAL THERAPY

 

Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin was a physician, philosopher, and scientist, but he wasn’t particularly adept at any of the three. Consequently, his ideas weren’t always taken seriously. Of course, this could be because he liked to record them in bad poetic verse (sample: “By immutable immortal laws / Impress’d in Nature by the great first cause, / Say, Muse! How rose from elemental strife / Organic forms, and kindled into life”). It could also be because his theories were a bit far-fetched, such as his spinning-couch treatment.

 

Darwin’s logic was that sleep could cure disease and that spinning around really fast a great way to induce the slumber. Nobody paid much attention to it at first, but later, American physician Benjamin Rush adapted the treatment for psychiatric purposes. He believed that spinning would reduce brain congestion and, in turn cure mental illness. He was wrong. Instead, Rush just ended up with dizzy patients who were still crazy. These days, rotating chairs are limited to the study of vertigo and space sickness.

 

4) HYDROTHERAPY

 

If the word “hydrotherapy” conjures up images of Hollywood stars lazily soaking in rich, scented baths, then you probably weren’t an early 20th-centruy mental patient.

 

Building off the idea that a dip in the water is often calming, psychiatrists of yore attempted to remedy various symptoms with corresponding liquid treatments. For instance, hyperactive patients got warm, tiring baths, while lethargic patients received stimulating sprays. Some doctors, however, got a bit too zealous about the idea, prescribing therapies that sounded more like punishment than panacea. One treatment involved mummifying the patient in towels soaked in ice-cold water. Another required the patient to remain continuously submerged in a bath for hours even days-which might not sound so bad, except they were strapped in and only allowed out to use the restroom.

 

Finally, some doctors ordered the use of high-pressure jets. Sources indicate that at least one patient was strapped to the wall in the crucification position (never a good sign) and blasted with water from a fire hose. Like many extreme treatments, hydrotherapy was eventually replaced with psychiatric drugs, which tended to be more effective – and more pleasant.

 

5) MESMERISM

 

Much like Yoda, Austrian physician Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) believed that an invisible force pervaded everything in existence, and that disruptions in this force caused pain and suffering. But Mesmer’s ideas would have been of little use to Luke Skywalker. His basic theory was that the gravity of the moon affected the body’s fluids in much the same way it caused ocean tides, and that some diseases accordingly waxed and waned with the phases of the moon. The dilemma, then, was to uncover what could be done about gravity’s pernicious effects. Mesmer’s solution: use magnets.

 

After all, gravity and magnetism were both about objects being attracted to each other. Thus, placing magnets on certain areas of a patient’s body might be able to counteract the disruptive influence of the moon’s gravity and restore the normal flow of bodily fluids. Surprisingly, many patients praised the treatment as a miracle cure, but the medical community dismissed it as supposititious hooey and chalked up his treatment successes to the placebo effect.

 

Mesmer and his theories were ultimately discredited, but he still left his mark. Today, he’s considered the father of modern hypnosis because of his inadvertent discovery of the power of suggestion, and his name lives on in the English word “mesmerize.”

 

6) MALARIA THERAPY

 

Ah, if only we’re talking about about a therapy for malaria. Instead, this is malaria as therapy-specifically, as a treatment for syphilis. There was no cure for the STD until the early 1900s, when Viennese neurologist Wagner von Jauregg got the idea to treat syphilis sufferers with malaria-infected blood. Predictably, these patients would develop the disease, which would cause an extremely high fever that would kill the syphilis bacteria. Once that happened, they were given the malaria drug quinine, cured and sent home happy and healthy.

 

The treatment did have its share of side effects -that nasty sustained fever, for one – but it worked and it was a whole lot better than dying. In fact, Von Jauregg won the Nobel Prize for malaria therapy, and the treatment remained in use until the development of penicillin came along and gave doctors a better, safer way to sure the STD.

 

7) CHEMICALLY INDUCED SEIZURES

 

Nobody ever said doctors had flawless logic. A good example: seizure therapy. Hungarian pathologist Ladislas von Meduna pioneered the idea. He reasoned that, because schizophrenia was rare in epileptics, and because epileptics seemed blissfully happy after seizures, then giving schizophrenics seizures would make them calmer.

 

In order to do this von Meduna tested numerous seizure-inducing drugs (including such fun candidates as strychnine, caffeine, and absinthe) before settling on metrazol, a chemical that stimulates the circulatory and respiratory systems. And although he claimed the treatment cured the majority of his patients, opponents argues that the method was dangerous and poorly understood.

 

To this day, no one is quite clear on why seizures can help ease some schizophrenic symptoms, but many scientists believe the convulsions release chemicals otherwise lacking in patient’s brains. Ultimately, the side effects (including fractured bones and memory loss) turned away both doctors and patients.

 

HYSTERIA THERAPY

 

Once upon a time, women suffering from pretty much any type of mental illness were lumped together as victims of hysteria. The Greek physician Hippocrates popularized the term, believing hysteria encompassed conditions ranging from nervousness to fainting fits to spontaneous muteness. The root cause, according to him, was a wandering womb.

 

So, whither does it wander? Curious about Hippocrates’ theory, Plato asked himself that very question. He claimed that is the uterus “remains unfruitful long beyond its proper time, it gets discontented and angry and wanders in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives women to extremity.”

 

Consequently, cures for hysteria involved finding a way to “calm down” the uterus. And while there was no dearth of methods for doing this (including holding foul-smelling substances under the patient’s nose to drive the uterus away from the chest), Plato believed that the only sure-fire way to solve the problem was to get married and have babies. After all, the uterus always ended up in the right place when it came time to bear a child.

 

Although “womb-calming” as psychiatric treatment died out long ago, hysteria as a diagnosis hung around until the 20th century, when doctors began identifying conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias.

 

9) PHRENOLOGY

 

Around the turn of the 19th century, German physician Franz Gall developed phrenology, a practice based on the idea that people’s personalities are depicted in the bumps and depressions of their skulls.

 

Basically, Gall believed that the parts of the brain a person used more often would get bigger, like muscles. Consequently, these pumped-up areas would take up more skull space, leaving visible bumps in those places on your head. Gall then tried to determine which parts of the skull corresponded to which traits. For instance, bumps over the ears meant you were destructive; a ridge at the top of the head indicated benevolence; and thick folds on the back of the neck were signs of a sexually oriented personality.

 

In the end, phrenologists did little to make their mark in the medical field, as they couldn’t treat personality issues, only diagnose them (and inaccurately, at that). By the early 1900s, the fad had waned, and modern neuroscience had garnered dominion over the brain.

 

10) LOBOTOMY

 

Everybody’s favorite psychiatric treatment, the modern lobotomy was the brainchild of Egas Moniz, a Portuguese doctor. Moniz believed that mental illness were generally caused by problems in the neurons of the frontal lobe, the part of the brain just behind the forehead. So when he heard about a monkey whose violent, feces-throwing urges had been curbed by cute to the frontal lobe, Moniz was moved to try out the same thing on his patients. (The lobe-cutting, not the feces-throwing.) He believed the technique could cure insanity while leaving the rest of the patient’s mental function relatively normal, and his (admittedly fuzzy) research seemed to support that.

 

The accolades flooded in, and (in one of the lower points in the Karolinska Institute’s history) Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949.

 

After the lobotomy rage hit American shores, Dr. Walter Freeman took to traveling the country in his “lobotomobile” (no, really), performing the technique on everyone from catatonic schizophrenics to disaffected housewives. His road-ready procedure involved inserting a small ice pick into the brain through the eye socket and wiggling it around a bit.

 

While some doctors thought he’s found a way to save hopeless cases from the horrors of life-long institutionalization, others noted that Freeman didn’t bother with sterile techniques, had no surgical training whatsoever, and tended to be a bit imprecise when describing his patient’s recovery.

 

As the number of lobotomies increased, a major problem became apparent. The patients weren’t just calm; they were virtual zombies who scarcely responded to the world around them. Between that and the bad press received in films and novels such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the treatment soon fell out of favor.

 

Bonus: Father Hell Hath No Fury Like a Therapist Scorned

 

In the end, all 10 of these psychiatric treatments came under fire from critics and were shunned by the medical community. And the physicians involved usually went down with them. But not Franz Mesmer, the man behind mesmerism (see entry #5). He wasn’t going out without a fight – several, actually.

 

Mesmer’s career was plagued by various opponents, one of whom was a priest named Father Hell (Don’t worry. We had the name fact-checked, twice). Apparently, the good Maximilian Hell tried to take credit for Mesmer’s magnet-based psychiatric treatment. In response, a furious Mesmer replied by writing a dissertation explaining that the idea was his first. Unfortunately for Mesmer’s argument, he plagiarized much of said dissertation.

 

In the end, though, it didn’t matter much. Mesmer abandoned the practice in favor of his own personal magnetism. Somewhere along the way, he’d noticed that he could obtain equally good results by simply placing his hands on a patient’s affected body part and concluded that he himself must be giving off magnetic energy.

 

Many people, including Father Hell, worried about a placebo effect, and controversy erupted once again. And again, Mesmer took great offense to his critics and defended his practices vehemently.

 

At one point, he even wrote an open letter to Marie Antoinette that belittled the Austrian royal family. Bad move. This prompted an irritated Louis XVI to appoint two commissions to investigate the magnetism fad. (For the record, members included Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Joseph Guillotin, after whom the guillotine was named.) One report concluded that Mesmer’s results were likely attributable to the power of suggestion. That would’ve been bad enough, but another, confidential, report insinuated that Mesmer had a particular fondness for laying his hands on the bodies of young and beautiful women.

 

 

 

 

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Optimists Live Longer, Study Reveals

Doctors Find Link Between Optimism and Lower Risk for Heart Disease, Early Death

 

By Lauren Cox/ Source: ABC News

 

If a chipper person in your life is annoying you, maybe you should brace yourself for that person outliving you in the long haul, according to findings of a new study.

 

A study of 100,000 women presented at the American Psychosomatic Society’s annual meeting Thursday found a strong correlation between optimism and a person’s risk for cancer-related death, heart disease and early death.

 

Researchers surveyed the personality traits of middle-age women in 1994 as part of the Women’s Health Initiative study run by the National Institutes of Health.

 

Eight years later, researchers found that the self-reported optimistic women were less likely to have died for any reason and had a 30 percent lower death rate from heart disease.

 

Meanwhile, women scoring high on the hostile scales had a higher general death rate and a 23 percent greater risk of dying from a cancer-related condition by the end of the study.

 

The finding confirms previous studies that linked optimism to longer life, said Hilary Tindle, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

 

Does Optimism Make a Healthy Life, or a Healthy Body?

 

However, the researchers could not tell if optimism was leading to healthier lifestyle choices, if optimism directly affected the physical manifestations of stress or both, Tindle said.

 

“What is the link? What is the mechanism? That’s one thing my study can’t answer,” Tindle said.

 

Tindle suggested it could be that optimistic people physically react to mental stress better, or that they are more likely to follow a doctor’s advice and, therefore, maintain their health. A third option may be a complex give-and-take between unhealthy and healthy behaviors and outlook on life.

 

For example, the optimistic women tended to have a healthier “risk profile,” in general, Tindle said.

 

“They are less likely to smoke, they are more likely to be active and they are more likely to have a lower BMI [body mass index],” she said. “All of these are risk factors that certainly matter for length of life and health.”

 

 

Can Optimism Change Health, or Not?

 

The opposite was true for women in the study who scored high on a cynical hostility scale, Tindle said.

 

The study found that women who scored high on cynicism in the first interview were also likely to smoke and not exercise over the years.

 

With all these correlations, Tindle said, it could be a happenstance that optimism tags along with healthy behavior rather than influencing someone’s health. To find a more direct link, the research team tried to mathematically cancel out the statistical influence that behaviors like smoking or exercise had on death risk.

 

“Even after for controlling all of those factors, we found a link,” said Tindle.

 

However cardiologists wonder whether someone could successfully weed out the effects of optimism on heart health with just one study.

 

“It’s hard to adjust for everything; there is a possibility that they’re missing things, and the people who are optimistic are maybe just eating better and sleeping well,” said Dr. Christie Ballantyne, the director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at the Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center in Houston.

 

“Maybe they missed things in the cynical people … elements in their lives that can affect heart disease,” he said.

 

Nevertheless, Ballantyne said the study’s findings struck him as a demonstration of the attitudes and reactions he sees in his practice.

 

“It’s probably very relevant in terms of the current economic environment,” said Ballantyne.

 

Ballantyne gave the example of two patients facing similar stresses at work — such as picking up extra duties from laid-off employees.

 

“What I typically see when people have stress is some people exercise less, they eat much worse. There is this whole issue of eating to make yourself feel better, drinking too much,” he said. “With a lot of people it seems things start to unravel in their lifestyle.”

 

Both Pessimism, Optimism Are Self-Fulfilling Prophesies

 

Rarely, he said, he might see a person react to stress with optimism and gear up for the temporary challenge at work by planning.

 

“People who are optimistic, they think, ‘well, I got to be a little more efficient. It’s going to be bad for a while. I’m going to work out and sleep.’”

 

In addition to the agreement with what he sees within his practice, Ballantyne thought the findings correlated to past studies about depression.

 

“There’s been a lot of data in terms of cardiovascular disease and depression, and this is a little bit of the flip side of depression, isn’t it?” he said.

 

“We’ve known for a long time that people who have depression have very high heart disease rates. … What they did was take it to another level,” said Ballantyne. “It’s one thing to not be depressed. It’s another to say that someone is optimistic.”

 

While all these studies work out how mood relates to health, they still leave the question of what a person is to do with their attitude.

 

“You can’t just make someone who is pessimistic, optimistic,” said Dr. Terry Rabinowitz, a professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington.

 

But Rabinowitz doesn’t always see pessimism and optimism and immutable qualities in someone’s personality. In fact, Rabinowitz said a person may go through extended periods of pessimism and optimism, even for years at a time — so there may be hope.

 

“You could take a snapshot of this cohort,” said Rabinowitz. “But what’s their overall view of the world, other than are they just pessimistic today, or this year?”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Was 9-11 “encoded” into a book copyrighted 4 years before the events ?

The true and often bone- chilling and inspiring book people are talking about…

A lifetime of unexplainable and strange paranormal events that led to important guidance for us all …

Hidden Secrets of Many, But One  By Donald Ryles PhD

*****

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UFO,Conspiracy,& Beyond

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 Official Website

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Dial H for Happiness: How Neuroengineering May Change Your Brain

By Quinn Norton / Source: Wired.com

 

Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick may have best anticipated neuroengineering in his most famous work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis of the movie Blade Runner. The main character and his wife get up in the morning and select their moods on what Dick called a Penfield mood organ.

 

We’re a long way from building a Penfield mood organ, but we already have ways of prodding our brains. Sometimes we achieve miracle cures, sometimes just trim the edge off the pain, but even the little tweaks can mean the difference between the livable and unlivable life.

 

Next to the microscopes and viruses at Dr. Ed Boyden’s MIT lab is an electronics bench littered with half-finished breadboards, bits of wire and solder. From a drawer, Boyden lifts a twisted mess of connectors and wires hooked to a copper coil the size of a golf ball. This is a transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, machine. When held to the head it’s capable of electrically affecting areas of the brain within a few centimeters of the surface.

 

Luigi Galvani, a physician and natural philosopher of the 18th century, was the first to figure out that nerves were electrical in nature. His assistant tapped a dissected frog’s leg with a scalpel he’d picked up from a statically charged table. The static electricity arced to the nerve of the dead frog’s leg, making it twitch like living material.

 

From then on it was understood that the brain and its attendant peripheral nerves ran on electricity. Inspired by the twitching dead nervous system, Mary Shelley had Frankenstein’s monster raised from the dead by a lightning bolt. But her approach, while a nice literary touch, was overkill: All you need is a very weak current to activate brain cells in a given region.

 

In fact, TMS gets electricity into the brain peacefully, without either cutting it open or shocking it with millions of volts.

 

The target area of the brain is treated like the coil in a generator, subjected to rapidly changing magnetic fields until electricity begins to dance across its neurons. Unlike the optical switch developed by Boyden and Stanford’s Dr. Karl Deisseroth, TMS doesn’t reach the deeper regions of the brain, but there are a lot of important and interesting areas in the cortex where TMS delivers its current. It’s also far less precise than the optical switch, although TMS seems positively surgical when compared to the imprecisions of the pharmaceuticals we pump into our bodies.

 

“The magnetic field has an effective area of stimulation that is — at the smallest — the size of a thumb,” says Dr. Bret Schneider, a neurological researcher at Stanford Medical School. TMS produces an impressionistic sweep of neural activation in the brain that researchers have used to do everything from inducing savant-like skills to causing people to take greater risks. Clinicians use it to treat migraines and depression, among other things.

 

Schneider has agreed to give me TMS. Specifically, he will use it on a part of my brain that controls movement: the motor cortex. He ushers me into an overly large black leather chair. Except for the large, two-lobed paddle hanging from the back, which is connected to an impressive power supply, the chair resembles something a therapist might use. “There are a number of nerves that pass through the scalp, and consequently, most patients do feel the magnetic pulses,” he says by way of warning.

 

A few inches over my ear is the part of my brain that controls my hand and arm. Schneider holds the coil there and activates it. The muscles in my scalp contract automatically, and it stings. My hand is jumping with each loud snap from the TMS machine.

 

“What you’re feeling is nerves actually depolarizing,” he says. “[It's] sending a current through them, they’re releasing their neurotransmitters with each pulse.”

 

TMS feels like a determined and annoying older sibling repeatedly flicking you in the head. It’s easy to imagine the subtleties of subjective experience being lost in the snapping, cracking, and the arm-twitching, that, while involuntary, is easy to misinterpret as sheer exasperation. Ow, quit it! Ow, quit it!

 

At first I imagine that my arm jerking is just me responding to the annoyance of being thumped on the head. I am, in short, confabulating wildly. Then I lift my arm on my own power, and watch as it continues jump in midair. I am definitely not doing that.

 

 

Schneider hands me the coil and shows me how to hold it over my left motor cortex, which controls the right side of my body. I use it on myself, holding the unit over my left brain, making my own right hand jump involuntarily.

 

“TMS seems to be relatively benign, and a fairly short list of adverse effects have been identified,” says Schneider.

 

Transcranial magnetic stimulation is quite safe for use as a neurological therapy or research tool. Its effects are temporary, and while TMS can induce a seizure, that usually won’t occur without a deliberate effort or gross negligence on the part of the operator. Focused on a bipolar patient, TMS can also induce massive mania and psychosis. The effect there is also also temporary, although the damage to the person’s credit rating, car or goodwill of his neighbor may not be.

 

In short, TMS, which has been around for barely 20 years, shows enormous potential for certain types of neural conditions.

 

Boyden’s lab has several plans for this technology. Smaller, cheaper and more hackable versions of TMS machines are being built. They’ve put together an open source TMS project that might allow anyone to start an at-home DIY brain hacking lab. Boyden tells me that his own TMS machine is a working prototype for an affordable, wearable unit that could go into much wider use in regular therapy offices, or even at home.

 

“One nice thing about medications is that they are compact — you can use them when you’re at home, when you’re traveling,” he says. “It would be nice to achieve that in other fields of neurotechnology.”

 

 

Back in his office, he goes beyond the medical applications. “As technologies are proven safe and effective, they will become more widespread, helping more people — not always those with the most severe needs. It’s the same story that any health-related technology has ever taken.”

 

Boyden theorizes that TMS could someday be a “prosthetic for creativity,” based on its ability to increase concentration and risk-taking. That is, if people can get past how strange the whole thing seems.

 

“We know so little about the brain that it’s easy to find projects that [are] both … philosophically important problems, and also can assist [with] new treatments of neurological and psychiatric disorders,” he says.

 

It’s a shotgun approach to trying to work out what can be done with the most complicated system we’ve yet found in the universe — ourselves — using the output of that system, technology.

 

“The field as a whole is wrestling with what to make of such technology,” says Boyden.

 

Neuroengineering raises a number of ethical issues, not the least of which centers on the question of when and how to treat certain conditions using the new technology. As an example, Dr. Debra Matthews, a bioethicist at The Berman Institute of Bioethics, points out that many in the deaf community feel that treatment of deafness is an assault on their culture. For them it’s a question of identity, not necessarily a handicap.

 

“Who is defining better?” says Matthews. “Who decides what is a disability? Who decides what is normal?”

 

But she also says that these questions are not a sufficient reason to prevent neuroengineers from pressing ahead, no matter what kind of strange wonders they might produce.

 

“A course of research shouldn’t be stopped by the mere presence of moral disagreement,” she says. “[But] it’s absolutely a reason to think about it and have a public conversation about it.”

 

The MIT Media Lab, which houses Boyden’s neuroengineering lab, is a kind of utopia of clutter, a fluorescent lit cave of saliva-worthy geek toys. Everyone there is sure that innovations to change the world are just around the corner, and that Boyden’s lab, like Deisseroth’s out at Stanford, is on the brink of changing the way we control our brains.

 

Walking a few blocks away from MIT late that night I find the other side of the universe, still in Cambridge. There’s a gig going strong at 1 a.m., deep in the back of a dive bar on Massachusetts Avenue. On the street outside, old black men stand around, some with instrument cases, some with cigarettes dangling from their lips. It gets me to thinking.

 

All of us — them, me, the cops gliding past in their cruisers — are really just brains floating around on the ends of spine sticks. Involuntarily, I see everyone with a wire fed into their cortexes, some part of themselves commanded by their choice at a given moment. A little primitive Penfield mood organ above every ear, if you will.

 

So I wonder: What bit of themselves would each of us wish to control? Where would we direct our own TMS, if we could?

 

It’s a terrible responsibility to consciously shoulder. What is the mind that’s choosing the shape of its own brain?

 

“I think if you ask most neuroscientists, they don’t find that particular question puzzling,” says Deisseroth. “Thoughts, feelings and drives derive from patterns of electrical activity … [but] there are other ways to think about it.

 

“The mind could be that little spark of consciousness that is floating around, guiding your direction and attention and desires and thoughts. Something that recruits different parts of the brain…. What is that little floating entity that uses the brain? The part that uses the visual cortex, that uses sensory input, what is that?”

 

If that part isn’t what puzzles neuroscientists at the moment, it’s important to remember that it’s the crucial part for the old men on Mass. Ave. A description of reward pathways and their functions will never really explain what it means to need a clearly unneeded cigarette, much less the define a lifetime of desire that turned a second-hand guitar into the organ of an old blues player’s soul. But without a doubt, changing those pathways can change everything.

 

When I ask Boyden what this work means for the far-off future, he puts his hands in his pockets and scrunches back in his seat.

 

“I think society is going to change,” he says. “People are going to understand more about themselves than they’ve ever understood before.”

 

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Was 9-11 “encoded” into a book copyrighted 4 years before the events ?

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A lifetime of unexplainable and strange paranormal events that led to important guidance for us all …

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*****

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Mental Health-10 Habits of Highly Effective Brains

By Alvaro Fernandez

Source: Huffington Post

 

 

If you are reading this, the good news is that you have a brain inside your head. And you have probably read about the emerging brain fitness movement: frequent articles in the media, an ongoing PBS special, more and more products and games.

 

Newsweek’s Sharon Begley recently wrote that “With the nation’s 78 million baby boomers approaching the age of those dreaded “where did I leave my keys?” moments, it’s no wonder the market for computer-based brain training has shot up from essentially zero in 2005 to $80 million this year, according to the consulting firm SharpBrains.”

 

Now, before you embark on buying any of those programs, you should know that there is a lot we can do without spending a dime. Based on dozens of interviews with scientists and recent research findings, let’s take a look at some of the habits of Highly Effective Brains:

 

1. Learn what is the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”.

 

A basic understanding will serve you well to appreciate your brain’s beauty as a living and constantly-developing dense forest with billions of neurons and synapses.

 

2. Take care of your nutrition.

 

Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but consumes over 20% of the oxygen and nutrients we intake? As a general rule, you don’t need expensive ultra-sophisticated nutritional supplements, just make sure you don’t stuff yourself with the “bad stuff”.

 

3. Remember that the brain is part of the body.

 

Things that exercise your body can also help sharpen your brain: physical exercise enhances neurogenesis.

 

4. Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mindset and you look forward to every new day in a constructive way.

 

Stress and anxiety, no matter whether induced by external events or by your own thoughts, actually kills neurons and prevents the creation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the opposite of exercise: it prevents the creation of new neurons.

 

5. Thrive on Learning and Mental Challenges.

 

The point of having a brain is precisely to learn and to adapt to challenging new environments. Once new neurons appear in your brain, where they stay in your brain and how long they survive depends on how you use them. “Use It or Lose It” does not mean “do crossword puzzle number 1,234,567″. It means, “challenge your brain often with fundamentally new activities.”

 

6. We are (as far as we know) the only self-directed organisms in this planet. Aim high.

 

Once you graduate from college, keep learning. The brain keeps developing, no matter your age, and it reflects what you do with it.

 

7. Explore, travel.

 

Adapting to new locations forces you to pay more attention to your environment. Make new decisions, use your brain.

 

8. Don’t Outsource Your Brain.

 

Not to media personalities, not to politicians, not to your smart neighbor, not to this blogger… Make your own decisions, and mistakes. And learn from them. That way, you are training your brain, not your neighbor’s.

 

9. Develop and maintain stimulating friendships.

 

We are “social animals”, and need social interaction. Which, by the way, is why the Baby Einstein series has been shown not to be the panacea for children development.

 

10. Laugh. Often.

 

Especially to cognitively complex humor, full of twists and surprises. Better, try to become the next Jon Stewart, and create your own unique humor.

 

Keep in mind that what counts is not reading this article – or any other one – but practicing a bit every day until small steps snowball into unstoppable, internalized habits… so, pick your next battle and try to start improving at least one of these 10 habits during the holidays

 

__________________________________

A lifetime of unexplainable and strange paranormal events…Spirit/Alien contact foretelling 9-11 and beyond 4 years before the events and guidance for us all after ?

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Mental Health-Heart Pill Erases Bad Memories

Source: BBC

 

Scientists believe a common heart medicine may be able to banish fearful memories from the mind.

 

The Dutch investigators believe beta-blocker drugs could help people suffering from the emotional after-effects of traumatic experiences.

 

They believe the drug alters how memories are recalled after carrying out the study of 60 people, Nature Neuroscience reports.

 

But British experts questioned the ethics of tampering with the mind.

 

Paul Farmer, chief executive of mental health charity Mind, said he was concerned about the “fundamentally pharmacological” approach to people with problems such as phobias and anxiety.

 

He said the procedure might also alter good memories and warned against an “accelerated Alzheimer’s” approach.

 

In the study, the researchers artificially created a fearful memory by associating pictures of spiders with a mild electric shock delivered to the wrists of the volunteers.

 

A day later the volunteers were split into two groups – one was given the beta blocker propranolol and the other a dummy drug before both were shown the same pictures again.

 

The researchers assessed how fearful of the pictures the volunteers were by playing sudden noises and measuring how strongly they blinked, something called the “startle response”.

 

Memories erased

 

The group that had taken beta blockers showed less fear than the group that had taken the placebo pill.

 

The following day, once the drug was out of their system, the volunteers were retested. Once again, those who had taken the beta blocker were less startled by the images.

 

 

Study leader Dr Merel Kindt explained that although the memories are still intact, the emotional intensity of the memory is dampened.

 

Dr Kindt stressed that using the procedure for complex conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder was still many years away.

 

Experiments on animals has shown beta blockers can interfere with how the brain makes sense of frightening events.

 

He told Nature Neuroscience: “Millions of people suffer from emotional disorders and the relapse of fear, even after successful treatment.

 

“Our findings may have important implications for the understanding and treatment of persistent and self-perpetuating memories in individuals suffering from emotional disorders.”

 

But Professor Neil Burgess of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience said the research merely demonstrates that the beta blockers reduce a person’s startle response, breaking the association of the spider to these unconscious responses.

 

And Dr Daniel Sokol, lecturer in Medical Ethics at St George’s, University of London, said memories were important, for people to learn from their mistakes for example.

 

“Removing bad memories is not like removing a wart or a mole. It will change our personal identity since who we are is linked to our memories. It may perhaps be beneficial in some cases, but before eradicating memories, we must reflect on the knock-on effects that this will have on individuals, society and our sense of humanity.”

 

John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said: “An interesting complexity is the possibility that victims, say of violence, might wish to erase the painful memory and with it their ability to give evidence against assailants.”

 

 

__________________________________

A lifetime of unexplainable and strange paranormal events…Spirit/Alien contact foretelling 9-11 and beyond 4 years before the events and guidance for us all after ?

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Hidden Secrets of Many, But One

 By Donald Ryles PhD

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Mental Health-How the City Hurts Your Brain

By Jonah Lehrer / Source: Boston Globe

 

The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

 

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

 

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes.

 

After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

 

“The mind is a limited machine,”says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

 

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

 

This research arrives just as humans cross an important milestone: For the first time in history, the majority of people reside in cities. For a species that evolved to live in small, primate tribes on the African savannah, such a migration marks a dramatic shift. Instead of inhabiting wide-open spaces, we’re crowded into concrete jungles, surrounded by taxis, traffic, and millions of strangers. In recent years, it’s become clear that such unnatural surroundings have important implications for our mental and physical health, and can powerfully alter how we think.

 

This research is also leading some scientists to dabble in urban design, as they look for ways to make the metropolis less damaging to the brain. The good news is that even slight alterations, such as planting more trees in the inner city or creating urban parks with a greater variety of plants, can significantly reduce the negative side effects of city life. The mind needs nature, and even a little bit can be a big help.

 

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There’s the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they’re going and how to get there.

 

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

 

Natural settings, in contrast, don’t require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it’s long been known that human attention is a scarce resource — focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon — Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect.

 

Imagine a walk around Walden Pond, in Concord. The woods surrounding the pond are filled with pitch pine and hickory trees. Chickadees and red-tailed hawks nest in the branches; squirrels and rabbits skirmish in the berry bushes. Natural settings are full of objects that automatically capture our attention, yet without triggering a negative emotional response — unlike, say, a backfiring car. The mental machinery that directs attention can relax deeply, replenishing itself.

 

“It’s not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,” says Berman. “They needed to put a park there.”

 

In a study published last month, Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor.

 

The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature.

 

“We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it’s like to be there,” says Berman. “And that’s when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer.”

 

 

This also helps explain why, according to several studies, children with attention-deficit disorder have fewer symptoms in natural settings. When surrounded by trees and animals, they are less likely to have behavioral problems and are better able to focus on a particular task.

 

Studies have found that even a relatively paltry patch of nature can confer benefits. In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago.

 

Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.

 

“We’ve constructed a world that’s always drawing down from the same mental account,” Kuo says. “And then we’re surprised when [after spending time in the city] we can’t focus at home.”

 

But the density of city life doesn’t just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations — caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that’s responsible for directed attention, which means that it’s already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it’s less able to exert self-control, which means we’re more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don’t really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it’s surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.

 

“I think cities reveal how fragile some of our ‘higher’ mental functions actually are,” Kuo says. “We take these talents for granted, but they really need to be protected.”

 

Related research has demonstrated that increased “cognitive load” — like the mental demands of being in a city — makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.

 

City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. Kuo and her colleagues found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression. A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.

 

Long before scientists warned about depleted prefrontal cortices, philosophers and landscape architects were warning about the effects of the undiluted city, and looking for ways to integrate nature into modern life. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised people to “adopt the pace of nature,” while the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted sought to create vibrant urban parks, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, that allowed the masses to escape the maelstrom of urban life.

 

Although Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the “savannah hypothesis,” which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.

 

However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

 

“We worry a lot about the effects of urbanization on other species,” Fuller says. “But we’re also affected by it. That’s why it’s so important to invest in the spaces that provide us with some relief.”

 

When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. As the Berman study demonstrates, just looking at a natural scene can lead to higher scores on tests of attention and memory. While people have searched high and low for ways to improve cognitive performance, from doping themselves with Red Bull to redesigning the layout of offices, it appears that few of these treatments are as effective as simply taking a walk in a natural place.

 

Given the myriad mental problems that are exacerbated by city life, from an inability to pay attention to a lack of self-control, the question remains: Why do cities continue to grow? And why, even in the electronic age, do they endure as wellsprings of intellectual life?

 

Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory — the crowded streets, the crushing density of people — also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge — one of the densest cities in America — contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation.

 

The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as “not a nature person,” but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she’s better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits. Because there always comes a time, as Lou Reed once sang, when a person wants to say: “I’m sick of the trees/take me to the city.”

 

Jonah Lehrer is the author of the new book “How We Decide.” His first book was “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.” He is a regular contributor to Ideas.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

 

 

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Veterans Sue CIA over Mind Control Experiments

Source: The Guardian

 

It was 1968, and Frank Rochelle was 20 years old and fresh out of Army boot camp when he saw notices posted around his base in Virginia asking for volunteers to test uniforms and equipment.

 

That might be a good break after the harsh weeks of boot camp, he thought, and signed up.

 

Instead of equipment testing, though, the Onslow county, North Carolina, native found himself in a bizarre, CIA-funded drug testing and mind-control programme, according to a lawsuit that he and five other veterans and Vietnam Veterans of America filed last week. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco against the US department of defence and the CIA.

 

The plaintiffs seek to force the government to contact all the subjects of the experiments and give them proper healthcare.

 

The experiments have been the subject of congressional hearings, and in 2003 the US department of veterans affairs released a pamphlet that said nearly 7,000 soldiers had been involved and more than 250 chemicals used on them, including hallucinogens such as LSD and PCP as well as biological and chemical agents.

 

Lasting from 1950 to 1975, the experiments took place at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. According to the lawsuit, some of the volunteers were even implanted with electrical devices in an effort to control their behaviour.

 

Rochelle, 60, who has come back to live in Onslow county, said in an interview that there were about two dozen volunteers when he was taken to Edgewood. Once there, they were asked to volunteer a second time, for drug testing. They were told that the experiments were harmless and that their health would be carefully monitored, not just during the tests but afterward, too.

 

 

The doctors running the experiments, though, couldn’t have known the drugs were safe, because safety was one of the things they were trying to find out, Rochelle said.

 

“We volunteered, yes, but we were not fully aware of the dangers,” he said. “None of us knew the kind of drugs they gave us, or the after-effects they’d have.”

 

Rochelle said he was given just one breath of a chemical in aerosol form that kept him drugged for two and a half days, struggling with visions. He said he saw animals coming out of the walls and his freckles moving like bugs under his skin. At one point, he tried to cut the freckles out with a razor.

 

Not all the men in his group tested drugs. But he said even those who just tested equipment were mistreated.

 

“Their idea of testing a gas mask was to give you a faulty one and put you in a gas chamber,” he said. “It was just diabolical.”

 

The tests lasted about two months. Later, Rochelle was sent to Vietnam.

 

Now he’s rated 60% disabled by the veterans affairs department, he said, and has struggled to keep his civilian job working on US marine bases. He has breathing problems, and his short-term memory is so bad that he once left his son at a gas station.

 

Among other problems, he said, his doctor diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and said it came from the drug experiment. He has trouble sleeping and still sometimes has visions from the drug, he said.

 

A big goal of the lawsuit, Rochelle said, is to get the word out to the thousands of soldiers who were tested. Some may have forgotten all about the tests and not know that’s why they now have health problems.

 

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The Most Dangerous Psychological Experiments of the Past

By Jesse Bering / Source: Scientific American

 

When most people think about research ethics in psychology, they take the perspective of the participants (subjects) of the study. And, usually, what comes to mind is some outrageous battery of experimental procedures involving electric shocks, brain vivisections, or some sort of unauthorized subliminal incursion into one’s private thoughts. The boring truth is that the vast majority of studies are about as scary as cheese and crackers.

 

But there’s another ethical issue that you may not be so familiar with, and that has to do with protecting the research assistants running the study, many of whom are undergraduate students. In the field of social psychology, this is often a very real issue indeed. Sometimes there are dangers involved that the scientists themselves, I suspect, have not thought through entirely.

 

For example, in one study from the mid-1980s, investigators staged a rape scene on a college campus in which a male research assistant appeared to be sexually assaulting a struggling female research assistant. The man leaped out from behind some bushes and grabbed the female roughly, one hand around her waist and the other over her mouth. The female screamed, “Help! Help! Please help me! You bastard! Rape! Rape!” The investigators wanted to know whether passersby—random people who had the bad fortune of stumbling across this troubling event—would heroically intervene and save the girl.

 

The short answer is people were more likely to help when they were in a group than alone. Not too surprising. But the findings aside, the study raises many interesting ethical questions. Among them, what if the witness was more heroic than the researchers anticipated and physically harmed the “rapist?” I imagine it would be difficult for the actors to outpace a speeding bullet in explaining the purpose of the study to a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of character.

 

In an even earlier study in which research assistants were potentially placed in harm’s way, investigators in 1972 wanted to know how people on the street responded to being stared at. Perhaps “glared at” is a better way to describe the methods used in this particular study. In one version of the experiment, the research assistant pulled up in his motor scooter next to a car waiting at a red light and stared expressionlessly at the driver until the light turned green. In another version, the research assistant stood on the street corner, turned to face an approaching pedestrian, and again stared expressionlessly at this person’s face for an uncomfortable length of time.

 

As predicted, being stared at prompted people to ‘flee’ measurably faster than not being stared at. In the case of the motor scooter, car drivers who were in the staring condition stepped on the gas pedal harder when the light turned green than those in the control condition, as measured by the length of time it took them to cross the intersection. Likewise, pedestrians who were stared at also picked up their step.

 

Now, I happen to be a coward and would sheepishly avert my gaze if I thought an eight-year-old girl were giving me the evil eye. But there are plenty of people out there who do not take kindly to a stranger’s agonistic stares and the research assistants in these studies could have found themselves in a serious confrontation.

 

 

The fact that most people simply looked away and fiddled with their radios may have something to with the study being done in Kansas rather than, say, downtown L.A., but still it could have easily escalated to conflict.

 

In a final example of a study in which research assistants took their lives into their own hands, one very brave investigator set up shop in the toilet stall of a busy university restroom with a stopwatch and a periscope and used the latter to observe men at the urinals. “This provided a view,” the authors explained in the 1976 paper, “of the user’s lower torso and made possible direct visual sightings of the stream of urine.”

 

If you processed that last sentence, you’re probably asking yourself why anyone would want such a good view of a stranger’s micturating penis. In fact, the researchers were trying to gain a better understanding of paruresis, otherwise known as “shy bladder syndrome” (or “pee-shy,” “bashful bladder” and a variety of other monikers). In extreme cases, someone with a shy bladder cannot urinate in public facilities such as airports, restaurants, or their place of employment.

 

The idea behind this study was that invasion of personal space underlies paruresis—the closer another person is in proximity, the more trouble the pee-shy individual will have urinating. The restroom was therefore rigged so that, in addition to the observer in the toilet stall, another research assistant (called a “confederate” in social psychological parlance) stationed himself either at the urinal next to the unwitting participant or used the urinal farthest away from the participant. As predicted, when the participants were relieving themselves next to the confederate, their urination delay was significantly greater (8.4 sec) than when they were separated from the confederate by one urinal (6.2 sec) or when the confederate was absent (4.9 sec). The duration of urine flow also supported the hypotheses, with participants urinating, on average, for a briefer period in the close condition (17.4 sec) than in either the far (23.4 sec) or alone condition (24.8 sec).

 

Again, data aside, there are a number of ethical questions raised in this last study. One of these concerns should have been the wellbeing of the research assistant in the toilet stall. Had a particularly hostile participant noticed the glint of a periscope lens on the floor next to his foot, the research assistant could have found himself laid up in a hospital bed for the next six months. The lengths some scientists will go to for a data point!

 

A final note. It is unlikely that the studies reported here could be done today. In psychological science terms, they are already ancient and most contemporary research ethics committees would see these projects as too high risk for a variety of reasons (including liability concerns for the investigator’s university employer). Frankly, I’m not sure today’s tighter restrictions are a good thing or a bad thing. For example, although they were certainly dangerous in their own ways, each of the studies mentioned above answered legitimate research questions and provided important insights into human social behavior. The realism they afforded by their naturalistic methods would be difficult – if not impossible – to replicate in a laboratory using more innocuous approaches. Once people know they are in an experiment (particularly, when they know the purpose of the study) they tend to behave artificially.

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