Scientists who rock

Joseph LeDoux

The review journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a reflective essay in-press written by Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist and performer with the Amygdaloids, a band that sings songs about "love and life peppered with insights drawn from research about mind and brain and mental disorders".

As well as providing interesting background info on the Amygdaloids (they're currently working on a EP called In Our Minds), LeDoux reflects on why so many scientists are drawn to music, and he talks about the benefits that performing music has brought to his own life and work. "Playing music makes me a healthier, happier person," he says. "It not only connects me with others in a unique way, it also makes connections in my own mind, drawing up emotions and thoughts I didn’t know I had."

LeDoux also gives plenty of examples of other scientists who rock:

"Dan Levitin, author of bestselling books, This Is Your Brain On Music and The World in Six Songs, is part of the Diminished Faculties at McGill University. Harvard molecular biologist, Pardis Sabetti, heads Thousand Days. Francis Collins, Director of NIH, has played at benefits with Joe Perry of Arrowsmith. Richard Brown, a philosopher at CUNY, is in the house band of a monthly jam session he organizes (The Amygdaloids played at their Qualia Freak Fest last year). Dave Sulzer, a neuroscientist at Columbia, has an alter ego as David Soldier, the leader of an avant garde music group. A biology-based bluegrass band in New York is called the Southern Blots. There’s a band of shrinks called The Psy- choanalytics. A New Jersey punk band is named the Lonely Ions. The Periodic Table hails from Long Island. Ryan Johnson of Michigan State is in Kinase Moves. The Science Fair is a jazz group from Norway that sings about science.

Andy Revkin, a biologist and New York Times environmental writer is part of the roots group Uncle Wade. Freaks of Nature are a science band from Philadelphia. The Cell Mates are from Yale. Darwin’s Finches are an a capella group from Rockefeller University. MacArthur awardee David Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington, plays guitar for Seattle band Big Dirt. Mike Shadlen, also at the University of Washington, fronts the Turing Machines. Chris Code, a psychologist from Exeter in the UK, is in Broken Road. The Society for Neuroscience has a music social every year at its annual meeting, where brain geeks strap on guitars and other instruments. And we shouldn’t overlook that there are some really well known rockers with connections to science. Brian May of Queen has a PhD in astronomy and spends part of his time these days teaching at Imperial College London. Greg Gaffin of Bad Religion has a PhD from Cornell and teaches life science at UCLA. They Might Be Giants does some science-themed songs. We Are Scientists, on the other hand, seem to only be connected to science in name."

To his list I can add at least four psychologists who rock: Catherine Loveday, a neuropsychologist at the University of Westminster plays keyboard and sings backing vocals in a band; Ellen Poliakoff, a psychologist at the University of Manchester is in a band called Stray Light; Rob Hughes, a psychologist at Cardiff was in a band called Alien Matter; and psychologist Stephen Kosslyn was in a band when he lived in Cambridge Massachusetts. Do you know of any other psychologists who rock?

Update. More psychologists/neuroscientists who rock (grabbed from comments or Twitter): Stats whiz Andy Field drums with Fracture Pattern; Charles Fernyhough plays guitar with the Aimless Mules; Tim Byron plays keyboard with Lazy Susan; Roy Baumeister apparently plays guitar; Matt Wall is a UCL neuroscientist who plays guitar in a pub-rock covers band; and post-doctoral psychology researcher Dan Carney plays guitar and sings in the folk/indie/electronic band Dark Captain Light Captain (they've had Single of The Week on iTunes US, toured the UK, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, and been played on Radio 1/Radio 2/XFm etc... They've also soundtracked a Royal Bank of Scotland advert and had their music used on numerous TV programmes both here and abroad!).

-Read The Flip Side: Scientists Who Rock (pdf) by Joseph LeDoux.

(Thanks to Tadhg MacIntyre for the tip-off about this article, and about Kosslyn).

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Derren Brown, purveyor of bad science

Derren Brown is a brilliant entertainer. He captivated much of the nation last week when he appeared to predict Wednesday's national lottery result. The country was abuzz with speculation about how he'd achieved the feat and we eagerly awaited his Friday-night show where he promised to reveal all. But rather than explaining how he'd performed Wednesday's illusion, Brown committed a disservice to the public understanding of psychology. He invoked a real, fascinating phenomenon in social psychology - the so-called "wisdom of crowds" - distorted it, and half-baked it with flim flam about "automatic writing" and "deep maths".

The wisdom of crowds is the consistent finding that the averaged judgements of a diverse group of independent people will nearly always be more accurate than any single person's judgement, no matter how expert that individual is. Note the emboldened words. The group must be diverse, with members having unique insights into the problem at hand. Group members must also be independent, in the sense that their own judgement is not contaminated or swayed by the opinions of others. In these conditions, the combined, diverse knowledge of a group of people can be effectively brought to bear on a problem. Judgements biased in one direction will be cancelled out by judgements biased in the other direction, as the group's combined verdict homes in on the truth.

As described by James Surowiecki in his excellent book, stock exchanges provide an ideal, though imperfect, medium for the collective pooling of wisdom as many thousands of individuals place their judgements on future outcomes. Stock exchanges often arrive at highly accurate judgements, both trivial as in the Hollywood Stock Exchange, and more serious, as in the share market's prediction of who was to blame for the Challenger space disaster.

There's also a fascinating literature on why crowds often work badly, rather than fulfilling their potential for wisdom. In group meetings, for example, research shows that people have an unfortunate tendency to talk about the information that they share, thereby undermining the diversity of knowledge in the group. Similarly, social dynamics can lead to diseases of the crowd such as "group think", in which the pursuit of consensus undermines the very independence of each individual's input that is so vital for the wisdom of the crowd to emerge.

Other new exciting research in this field suggests that individuals may be able to exploit the principles of the wisdom of the crowd on their own, by making repeated, independent judgements and averaging them.

Returning to Derren Brown's lottery explanation, we can see that the wisdom of crowds has no use for predicting the lottery. His group of 24 individuals did not have diverse insight into what numbers will come next. The history of lottery results has no bearing on each successive draw, so there was no purpose in the group studying the archives of past results. Even if past results did affect future results, the 24 individuals sat staring at the same data. They didn't each bring their own unique knowledge to the table. Moreover, if Brown had really wanted to exploit the wisdom of crowds, he ought to have kept the members of his group separate so as to maintain their independence and prevent them biasing each others' input. And finally, why on earth would he have had a group of just 24 people? With so much at stake, if there had been any sense in attempting to pool the collective wisdom on this challenge (which there wasn't), Brown should have exploited the combined wisdom of as many people as he possibly could.

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These are the views of the Digest editor, not the British Psychological Society.

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Are these the most important discoveries in the history of psychology?

From The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker:

"The three laws of behavioural genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. Yet most psychologists have not come to grips with them... It is not because the laws are abstruse: each can be stated in a sentence, without mathematical paraphernalia. Rather, it is because the laws run roughshod over the Blank Slate [the idea that everything is learned, nothing innate], and the Blank Slate is so entrenched that many intellectuals cannot comprehend an alternative to it, let alone argue about whether it is right or wrong.

Here are the three laws:

• All human behavioural traits are heritable.
• The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
• A substantial proportion of the variation in complex human behavioural traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families."

Later Pinker explains the implications the laws have for psychological research. For example:

"The First Law implies that any study that measures something in parents and something in their biological children and then draws conclusions about the effects of parenting is worthless, because the correlations may simply reflect their shared genes (aggressive parents may breed aggressive children, talkative parents talkative children)."

Previously on the Digest: Switching the parents around.

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Psychological titbits from the Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, Chicago, 12-16 Feb

In the absence of formal tuition, deaf children invent their own signs. 'I have been able to follow children in Nicaragua who are not near a special education school and accordingly continue developing their homesigns independently,' said Marie Coppola (University of Chicago). Coppola thinks the spontaneous signing she's observed in children is what underlay the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language. This system was developed independently in the 1970s by children at a school for the deaf in the country's capital after they were encouraged to read lips and speak rather than use sign.

Brain scans of twenty-three undergraduate students have pointed to the possibility that abnormal brain activity can contribute to feelings of loneliness. The students were shown images of people in either pleasant or unpleasant settings. Relative to non-lonely students, those students who were lonely showed reduced reward-related activation in the ventral striatum in response to the positive images, and reduced empathy-related activity in the temporal-parietal junction in response to the unpleasant images. Whilst loneliness may cause these differences, John Cacioppo (University of Chicago) and colleagues said it's also possible that the direction of causation is the other way around.

Players of internet-based fantasy games like Everquest II can play with other gamers across the globe and yet they mostly choose to play with people who live nearby. 'It's not creating new networks. It's reinforcing existing networks,' said Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University). 'Individuals 10 kilometres away from each other are five times more likely to be partners than those who are 100 kilometres away from each other.' Other findings to emerge from the study, which involved 60 tetrabytes of data and 7000 participants, were that players underestimated the time they spent playing and were more likely than average to suffer from depression.

A walk in the park can improve the concentration of children with ADHD with the benefit being of the same magnitude as that reported for drug treatments. Frances Kuo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and colleagues tested children with ADHD on a concentration task after either a walk in the park or in an urban environment. Kuo said this was just the latest in a series of studies pointing to the psychological benefits of natural environments. 'So when people say: “As a scientist, would you say that we now know nature is essential to optimal functioning in humans?” I say: “As a scientist I can’t tell you. I’m not ready to say that”,' Kuo admitted. ‘But as a mother who knows the scientific literature, I would say, “Yes”.’

Baboons and even pigeons are able to perform a cognitive feat that was previously considered a uniquely human ability – that is, to think about the relations between relations. This is the ability, when comparing A with A, to recognise that they are the same and that their relation to each other is therefore different from the relation shared between A and B, which are different to each other. 'What we're really trying to understand is the extent to which cognition is general throughout the animal kingdom,' Ed Wasserman (University of Iowa) explained. 'The evidence that we collect constantly surprises us, suggesting that we're not alone in many of these cognitive abilities.'

Link to AAAS meeting website. 

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The official verdict on UK psychology research

The results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) are in, and they show that 11 per cent of the UK's psychological research, as submitted by 76 universities, was judged to be of the highest 'world leading' 4* standard.

The results of the RAE, the last of which was in 2001, are a sensitive issue because they affect how much research funding departments will receive in the future from funding bodies – with higher rated institutions due to be awarded more money.

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had the highest proportion (35 per cent) of psychological research awarded the 'world leading' grade. Not far behind, 30 per cent of psychology research at UCL received this grade, as did 25 per cent of research at Birmingham, Birkbeck and Cardiff.

Considering the top two grades – 4* 'world leading' and '3* 'internationally excellent' – 45 per cent of psychology research at UK institutions achieved this level. The University of Cambridge had the highest proportion (85 per cent) graded in these top two categories. The Universities of Oxford and Birmingham followed with 80 per cent, UCL at 75 per cent, and Birkbeck, Cardiff and Royal Holloway with 70 per cent.

The results should be interpreted with caution given that the exercise allowed institutions to choose how many of their staff to submit to scrutiny. For example, the University of Cambridge submitted 24 psychology researchers to the exercise compared with Cardiff University's submission of 59 – the highest number for a single psychology department. How to interpret these figures is not clear, however, because the RAE haven't published the proportion of eligible staff who were submitted from each department.

It should also be noted that clinical psychology had the option of being assessed separately from the rest of psychology, in a grouping with psychiatry and neuroscience. Just 17 institutions submitted research to the exercise under this subject heading, with the University of Cambridge having the most research rated as 'world leading' (40 per cent), and the equal highest amount of research (80 per cent) rated as either 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent', with Cardiff University also achieving this proportion. Across all institutions, 57 per cent of research in this area was judged to be of 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent' standard.

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Note: all cited department gradings are based on non-weighted means available on the RAE website.

Link to RAE website.
Link to RAE results for psychology.
Link to RAE results for clinical psychology.

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I'm Still Here!

Alzheimer's disease is devastating and yet new research is highlighting the islands of function and ability that can and do survive the tide of illness (for example see these earlier Digest items). In a moving and inspirational forthcoming book, "I'm Still Here", John Zeisel - President of Hearthstone Alzheimer Care - has gathered together these findings and combined them with his own years of experience to create a positive, upbeat guide for how to relate to and care for people with Alzheimer's.

Take, for example, research showing that people with Alzheimer's retain their aesthetic tastes and even develop improved powers of creativity. As Zeisel explains:

"People living with Alzheimer's are artists, performers, and an attentive audience. An artist expresses himself from his heart, avoids being overly self-critical, and can unselfconsciously expressive his 'self' in his art. The lack of a fully functioning brain 'comparer' makes many people living with Alzheimer's better artists than they were before the disease. Just as inventive artistic personalities who have little regard for the rules of society are not deterred from their creative goals, even in the face of obvious difficulties, people living with Alzheimer's are often freer, more honest, and more expressive than most others."

One implication is that it can be a truly rewarding experience for patients and their carers to visit art museums and the book provides help and guidance for how to get the most out of these experiences.

Elsewhere, Zeisel draws on his expertise in architecture and design to provide advice on the kind of environment that is best suited for people with Alzheimer's. For example, making different rooms clearly different from each other can help patients understand where they are; clearly marking exits can make them feel less anxious; and allowing patients some private place to put their own photos and memorabilia, to stamp their own personality, has been shown to help reduce anxiety and aggression. Zeisel explains how the layout of a building can also make a difference:

"For people living with Alzheimer's the easier it is for them to comprehend and use an environment, the more empowered and independent they will be there. Naturally mapped residential settings and gardens, with visible landmarks indicating destinations and turning points, give them the opportunity to find their way. While wandering is often seen as a 'symptom' of Alzheimer's, it is more realistically a natural tendency that everyone has to explore, to search, and to have a goal. In a setting that has no obvious layout, people living with Alzheimer's wander. In a naturally mapped environment the same people walk."

Tragically, there is as yet no known cure for Alzheimer's and with an ageing population in the West, cases of the illness are set to spiral. Until a medical breakthrough occurs, this book - more of a personal guide than a dispassionate text - has the potential to offer comfort and practical advice in the form of non-pharmacological approaches, attitudes and interventions. As Zeisel says: "This book lays out a positive view of living with Alzheimer's that can lead to a life with quality for all involved as well as to effective treatment. The Alzheimer's glass is more than half full in this book."

Link to forthcoming book: "I'm Still Here".
Link to related Digest item: Alzheimer's patients retain their taste in art.
Link to another related Digest item: A flicker of light in a sea of darkness.

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Want to spend less? Ditch your credit card and don't shop when sad

As the recession bites, Newsweek magazine has a timely article on some of the brain processes underlying consumer decision making. The author Begley particularly emphasises research showing that people tend to be willing to spend more when they pay by credit card rather than cash:

"When you hand over a stack of 20s, you have less of something tangible: your billfold is lighter. That causes a brain region [the insula] that registers negative feelings (bad smells, unfairness, social ostracism) to become more active than when you charge a purchase. Humans have evolved to pay attention to the messages the insula sends, with the result that it hurts to pay cash. There is no such feeling of loss when you pay with plastic, so the insula doesn't react. Credit cards anesthetize the otherwise painful act of paying".

Begley goes on to quote this study (pdf) by MIT researchers in which participants were willing to pay significantly more for football game tickets or a restaurant voucher when using a credit card compared with cash.

Begley also highlights research by Cynthia Cryder and colleagues, showing that people are willing to pay more for products when they are feeling sad - perhaps because acquiring more stuff helps them feel better about themselves.

In short, it seems that if you want to reduce your spending this holiday season, you're best off carrying cash, not cards, and staying indoors if you're feeling blue.

Link to Newsweek article Inside the Shopping Brain by Sharon Begley.
Link to study showing people spend more when paying by credit card (pdf).
Link to study showing people spend more when miserable (pdf).

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January's Psychologist magazine - free for all!

The next issue of The Psychologist magazine has been made publicly available in its entirety via the digital platform Issuu (click mini version below to see full mag).



This service allows you to flick threw the pages online as if you had the magazine in your hands; to zoom in at will; print; share; and more. In fact this is very much a work in progress and the coming days will see the in-text weblinks go active, among other developments. We're aware of some problems with viewing the magazine in Internet Explorer and should have these ironed out in a jiffy.

January's issue features a particularly spicy cocktail of features, including articles on gossip, testosterone, stigma, obesity and an interview with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. There's also the usual mix of news, views and reviews.

If you like what you see, why not take out a print subscription?

The editor Dr Jon Sutton would love to hear your views on the magazine, including what you think of this new digital format. Use comments, below, or email him direct on jon.sutton[at]bps.org.uk.

Link to the January issue of The Psychologist.

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