All Washed Up
BrainWash Cafe & LaundromatThe popular press has been a major contributor to facile views of neuroimaging. So it seems ironic that everywhere you look, the new book Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience is in the news.Has neuroscience left us 'Brainwashed'?Dan Vergano, USA TODAY 9:39 a.m. EDT June 22, 2013Have we all been brainwashed about brain images? Amid dazzling insights and daily advances into the workings of the mind, they also may engrain mistaken ideas about human nature, a book warns.Will we see a reactionary resurgence of dualism as a result? In my previous post we learned th...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 24, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
A Conversation on "MINDLESS NEUROSCIENCE"
Brainwashed: The use and misuse of neuroscience Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld in conversation with David Brooks. NY Times columnist David Brooks had a dualist epiphany: the brain is not the mind.It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.The first basic problem is that regions of the brain handle a wide variety of different tasks. As Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld explained in their compelling and highly readable book, “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” you put somebody in an...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 19, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
A New Biomarker for Treatment Response in Major Depression? Not Yet.
Is a laboratory test or brain scanning method for diagnosing psychiatric disorders right around the corner? How about a test to choose the best method of treatment? Many labs around the world are working to solve these problems, but we don't yet have such diagnostic procedures (despite what some might claim). A new study by McGrath et al. (2013) might be a step in that direction, but the results are very preliminary and await further validation.The principal investigator of that study is Dr. Helen Mayberg, a leader in neuroimaging studies of major depression. She and her colleagues have pioneered the use of deep brain stim...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 14, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
How to Measure Female Desire
A Sexual Laboratory of One's Own, aka A Clean Well-Lighted Place for SexPsychophysiologic studies of sexual response should be done in a comfortable, well-designed laboratory to minimize subject anxiety and discomfort (Woodard & Diamond, 2009, Fig. 5). How do scientists measure the physiological aspects of sexual arousal in women? A 2009 paper by Woodard and Diamond reviewed 45 years of research using instruments that measure female sexual function. These devices include the vaginal photoplethysmograph (right), vaginal and labial thermistors, pressure/compliance balloons, clitoral electromyography, and the el...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 9, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Lybrido for Low Libido?
A feature article in last week's New York Times Magazine served as an extended ad for a new book by Daniel Bergner, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. It's filled with post-fashionable pop neuroscience and simplistic neurotransmitter stereotypes that rival those of Naomi Wolf (including her infamous “dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain” quote). The focus of Bergner’s article is on pharmaceutical treatments for the controversial diagnosis of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), particularly the subtly named Lybrido (along with its younger sister, Lybri...
Source: The Neurocritic - June 3, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Can Pot Smoking Counter the Negative Metabolic Consequences of Atypical Antipsychotics?
DISCLAIMER: This is a hypothetical question and not a medical recommendation. But it might be an idea worth investigating in epidemiological studies.Everyone knows that pot gives you the munchies. So the paradoxical finding that marijuana use is associated with a lower prevalence of obesity and diabetes came as a quite surprise to me. Now, a new study has concluded that pot smokers also have lower fasting insulin levels and smaller waistlines (Penner et al., 2013).I'll let the authors summarize the clinical significance of their study (Penner et al., 2013):Marijuana use is increasingly common, and use of medical marijuana ...
Source: The Neurocritic - May 27, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
The Mental Health of Lonely Marijuana Users
This study contained some limitations. First, it only assessed self-ratings of both self-worth and mental health. If marijuana use weakens the relationship between social pain and self-reported psychological well-being, then there should also be a lower rate of validated clinical diagnoses of poor psychological well-being.. . .To address the limitation of Study 1, Study 2 sought to show that marijuana buffered lonely participants from experiencing a standardized diagnosis of poor psychological well-being. Study 2 used a different nationally representative sample from Stu...
Source: The Neurocritic - May 22, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
What RDoC Research Might Look Like
The month of May is a violent thingIn the city their hearts start to singWell, some people sing, it sounds like they're screamingI used to doubt it, but now I believe itMonth Of May ------The Arcade FireToday is Mental Health Month Blog Day, sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA). It's designed to:...educate the public about mental health, decrease stigma about mental illness, and discuss strategies for making lasting lifestyle and behavior changes that promote overall health and wellness.If the public has been following the recent hullabaloo about how to diagnose mental illnesses, the...
Source: The Neurocritic - May 15, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
RDoC Dimensional Approach for Research vs. DSM-5 for Diagnosis
Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in the U.S., recently announced that NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories:...While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about...
Source: The Neurocritic - May 5, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Want to remember something? Clenching your fist doesn't help!
Image Credits: fist and brain.You might have seen this news story the other day:Want to remember something? Clench your fists!Giving a speech and need to remember what to say? Just clench your right fist while rehearsing. Then, when it's time to give the speech, clench your left fist, and voila, you’ll recall what you rehearsed! That's what a new study found, which was published April 24 online at PLOS ONE. Sounds too easy now, doesn't it? And if you're exclaiming, "that's just too good to be true!" — then you'd be correct.The new study by Propper et al. (2013) has unleashed a torrent of criticism on Twitter, i...
Source: The Neurocritic - April 28, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Does Tylenol Exert its Analgesic Effects via the Spinal Cord?
What do we (not) know about how paracetamol (acetaminophen) works? (Toussaint et al., 2010). . .From the beginning, the focus of the search for paracetamol’s analgesic mechanism has concentrated on the central nervous system. When administered intraventricularly [i.e., directly into the ventricular system of the brain], acetaminophen produces no significant analgesia (115, 132). This finding lead to attempts to inject acetaminophen into the spinal cord (i.t.), which produced marked dose-related antinociception (132).Yesterday’s post about Tylenol as a cure for mortality salience and existential dread got me a l...
Source: The Neurocritic - April 19, 2013 Category: Neurologists Source Type: blogs
Existential Dread of Absurd Social Psychology Studies
This study was conducted 3 to 6 months after a well-publicized local riot that followed the Vancouver Canucks’ loss in their bid for the Stanley Cup, and we expected that most students held a negative view of the riot. Thus, we expected that after a threat, participants would affirm this view by calling for stronger punishment for the rioters. Participants were informed that people were debating whether the rioters should be given sentences more lenient than those for comparable individual acts of vandalism, because the rioters had acted impulsively, or should be given stiffer sentences, because they had taken advantage ...
Source: The Neurocritic - April 18, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
branscannr on drugs
Which is better: the generic or the name brand? Now drug companies have a tool to test out the moods induced by the name of their latest drug.brainscannrfree brain scans for everyone! Over thirty million served! 1Let's start with some benzodiazepines!brainscannr resultsThis is your true brain, the emotions that run your life!Uh oh, not so great for lorazepam. How about for the name brand, Ativan?There. Don't you feel more relaxed now?Moving right along to some atypical antipsychotics. Let's start with olanzapine.Hmm, no psychiatrist wants to see a strip of skulls down their patient's postcentral gyrus. Not to mention a fro...
Source: The Neurocritic - April 10, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Are Cognitive Factors Related to Criminal Reoffending?
Image from Graphic SociologyCan Brain Activity Predict Criminal Reoffending? The previous post discussed a functional MRI study suggesting that the level of error-related activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) might have value in predicting whether a recently released prisoner will be rearrested within 4 years (Aharoni et al. 2013):The odds that an offender with relatively low anterior cingulate activity would be rearrested were approximately double that of an offender with high activity in this region, holding constant other observed risk factors. These results suggest a potential neurocognitive biomarker...
Source: The Neurocritic - March 31, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Can Brain Activity Predict Criminal Reoffending?
Is it possible for a brain scan to predict whether a recently paroled inmate will commit another crime within 4 years? A new study by Aharoni et al. (2013) suggests that the level of activity within the anterior cingulate cortex might provide a clue to whether a given offender will be rearrested.Dress this up a bit and combine with a miniaturized brain-computer interface that continuously uploads EEG activity to the data center at a maximum security prison. There, machine learning algorithms determine with high accuracy whether a given pattern of neural oscillations signals the imminent intent to reoffend that will t...
Source: The Neurocritic - March 28, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
