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Deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology
The Neurocritic
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- November 19, 2012
- 01:05 AM
- 257 views
Vicodin for Social Exclusion
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Cyberball (with apologies to Kipling D. Williams).Cyberball (not the Atari version) is a virtual game designed by social psychologists to be a model for social rejection and ostracism (Williams et al., 2000). The study participant is led to believe they are playing an online ball-tossing game with other people, who then proceed to exclude them from the game. The resultant negative feelings are meant to be a proxy for ostracism based on fundamental attributes such as race, disability, physical ap........ Read more »
Hayes, D., & Northoff, G. (2012) Common brain activations for painful and non-painful aversive stimuli. BMC Neuroscience, 13(1), 60. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2202-13-60
Riva, P., Romero Lauro, L., DeWall, C., & Bushman, B. (2012) Buffer the Pain Away: Stimulating the Right Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Reduces Pain Following Social Exclusion. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612450894
- November 9, 2012
- 02:12 PM
- 292 views
The Neuroscience of Speed Dating Choice
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Can brain activity measured while rating potential dates predict later choices at speed dating events?Haven't you lay awake at night wondering if 36 voxels in your rostromedial prefrontal cortex (RMPFC) can predict your future romantic decisions? If you have, you're in luck. Cooper and colleagues (2012) conducted an fMRI study to answer this burning question in the affirmative. "and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower an........ Read more »
Cooper, J., Dunne, S., Furey, T., & O'Doherty, J. (2012) Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Mediates Rapid Evaluations Predicting the Outcome of Romantic Interactions. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(45), 15647-15656. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2558-12.2012
- November 6, 2012
- 07:05 AM
- 303 views
Cotard's Syndrome: Not Pretending That We're Dead
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Playing dead game -- A craze called the "playing dead game" has swept this nation where people of all ages stage elaborate death scenes everyplace. Believing That We're DeadCotard's Syndrome is the delusional belief that one is dead or missing internal organs or other body parts (Debruyne et al., 2009). Those who suffer from this "delusion of negation" deny their own existence. The eponymous French neurologist Jules Cotard called it le délire de négation ("negation delirium").Cotard's sy........ Read more »
Debruyne H, Portzky M, Van den Eynde F, & Audenaert K. (2009) Cotard's syndrome: a review. Current psychiatry reports, 11(3), 197-202. PMID: 19470281
Nishio Y, & Mori E. (2012) Delusions of Death in a Patient with Right Hemisphere Infarction. Cognitive and behavioral neurology : official journal of the Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology. PMID: 23103861
- October 21, 2012
- 05:43 PM
- 341 views
Savoir Faire or Savant?
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Is amygdala volume correlated with social network size or with special talents in autism spectrum disorders? Or both??The amygdala is a subcortical structure located within the medial temporal lobes. It consists of a number of different nuclei, or collections of neurons delineated by commonalities in morphology and connectivity. The amygdala is best known for major roles in fear conditioning (Paré et al., 2004) and responding to emotional stimuli more generally (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005), ........ Read more »
Bickart, K., Hollenbeck, M., Barrett, L., & Dickerson, B. (2012) Intrinsic Amygdala-Cortical Functional Connectivity Predicts Social Network Size in Humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(42), 14729-14741. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1599-12.2012
Corrigan, N., Richards, T., Treffert, D., & Dager, S. (2012) Toward a better understanding of the savant brain. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 53(6), 706-717. DOI: 10.1016/j.comppsych.2011.11.006
- October 13, 2012
- 08:02 PM
- 379 views
Surrealistic Imaging Experiment #2
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Scene from Le sang d'un poète (1930, Jean Cocteau) 1"It is often said that The Blood of a Poet is a surrealist film. However, surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it." -Jean Cocteau 2In our second installment of Surrealistic Imaging Experiments, Marketing Professor Mohamed M. Mostafa of the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait was interested in how the brain processes Surrealistic imagery used in advertising (Mostafa, 2012). He approached the background to his topic ........ Read more »
Mohamed M. Mostafa. (2012) The persistence of memory: an fMRI investigation of the brain processing of Surrealistic imagery in advertising. Journal of Marketing Communications. DOI: 10.1080/13527266.2011.653688
- October 9, 2012
- 04:10 AM
- 292 views
Surrealistic Imaging Experiment #1
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
"The case against the realist position needs to be considered, after considering the materialist position. The latter, more poetic however than the former, admittedly implies on the part of a Man, a monstrous pride, but not a new and more complete degeneration. It should be seen, above all, as a welcome reaction against certain ridiculous spiritualist tendencies. Ultimately, it is not incompatible with a certain nobility of thought.The realistic position, in contrast, inspired by positivism, fro........ Read more »
Silveira S, Graupmann V, Frey D, Blautzik J, Meindl T, Reiser M, Chen C, Wang Y, Bao Y, PöppeI E.... (2012) Matching reality in the arts: self-referential neural processing of naturalistic compared to surrealistic images. Perception, 41(5), 569-76. PMID: 23025160
- October 3, 2012
- 01:08 PM
- 325 views
Law and Order: Psychiatry Unit
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Crime dramas on American television are known for loosely adapting actual news stories "ripped from the headlines" and calling them fiction. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is especially known for this pattern. For instance, in one episode last year a much beloved basketball coach who runs a charitable foundation was found guilty of sexually abusing his young players over the course of many years.In another episode, a well-known politician's long-kept secret is finally revealed after 13 year........ Read more »
Spuijbroek EJ, Blom N, Braam AW, & Kahn DA. (2012) Stockholm syndrome manifestation of Munchausen: an eye-catching misnomer. Journal of psychiatric practice, 18(4), 296-303. PMID: 22805905
- September 26, 2012
- 04:28 AM
- 360 views
Of Mice and Women: Animal Models of Desire, Dread, and Despair
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Scene from Mon Oncle d'Amérique by Alain ResnaisDr. James G. Pfaus, a Professor of Psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, recently wrote a post in defense of Naomi Wolf's neuroscience acumen. This is understandable, as he was one of her main sources of scientific information about the "brain-vagina connection" in Vagina: A New Biography. Wolf, as you know, has been under fire for her simplistic and gendered treatment of cortisol and dopamine, as if these chemicals have highly specific ........ Read more »
Adams K. (2011) The abject self: self-states of relentless despair. International journal of group psychotherapy, 61(3), 332-64. PMID: 21728704
Cryan JF, Markou A, & Lucki I. (2002) Assessing antidepressant activity in rodents: recent developments and future needs. Trends in pharmacological sciences, 23(5), 238-45. PMID: 12008002
Faure A, Reynolds SM, Richard JM, & Berridge KC. (2008) Mesolimbic dopamine in desire and dread: enabling motivation to be generated by localized glutamate disruptions in nucleus accumbens. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 28(28), 7184-92. PMID: 18614688
James G. Pfaus. (2006) Of rats and women: preclinical insights into the nature of female sexual desire. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 21(4), 463-476. info:/10.1080/14681990600967011
Richard JM, & Berridge KC. (2011) Nucleus accumbens dopamine/glutamate interaction switches modes to generate desire versus dread: D(1) alone for appetitive eating but D(1) and D(2) together for fear. The Journal of neuroscience, 31(36), 12866-79. PMID: 21900565
Richard JM, & Berridge KC. (2012) Prefrontal Cortex Modulates Desire and Dread Generated by Nucleus Accumbens Glutamate Disruption. Biological psychiatry. PMID: 22981656
- September 12, 2012
- 01:12 AM
- 324 views
The Electroencephalogram Cocktail Party
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
In 2005, filmmaker Joyce Draganosky made a short entitled The Science of Love, where......the battle between reason and emotion takes center stage. A professor, who believes she has found a way of determining scientifically whether someone is in love, clashes with her department chair, a woman who thinks love and attraction are far too complex to be mapped according to the certainties of science. The clip above highlights a hilarious event designed to determine the neural correlates of love......... Read more »
Gevins A, Chan CS, & Sam-Vargas L. (2012) Towards measuring brain function on groups of people in the real world. PloS one, 7(9). PMID: 22957099
- August 26, 2012
- 03:33 AM
- 369 views
The Art of Delicate Sadness
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Sad Noh masks (from Fig. 1 of Osaka et al., 2012).Noh is a traditional style of Japanese theater where the actors wear masks to convey facial expressions. Many of the masks are known for their ambiguity:As it is often difficult to tell the actual feelings expressed in a noh mask, it is said to be made with a “neutral” expression. The mask carver tries to instill a variety of emotions in the mask. It is up to the performer to imbue the mask with emotion. One of the techniques used in thi........ Read more »
Osaka N, Minamoto T, Yaoi K, & Osaka M. (2012) Neural correlates of delicate sadness: an fMRI study based on the neuroaesthetics of Noh masks. Neuroreport, 23(1), 26-9. PMID: 22113213
- August 18, 2012
- 05:25 AM
- 307 views
Predicting Brain Age from 231 Neuroanatomical Measures
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Is your child's brain on track to reach normal developmental milestones? A paper in Current Biology reports on a new, composite neuroanatomical metric of maturity that predicts 92% of the variance in brain age (Brown et al., 2012). Structural MRI scans were obtained from 885 healthy children and young adults ranging from 3 to 20 years of age. A set of 231 different measurements, or biomarkers, were used to determine the age that provided the best "fit" for each subject. The model made the mos........ Read more »
Brown T, and 21 others. (2012) Neuroanatomical Assessment of Biological Maturity. Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.07.002
- August 11, 2012
- 03:51 PM
- 327 views
Where Are the Clinical Tests for Psychiatric Disorders?
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Examination room, World War 1 (Otis Historical Archives Nat'l Museum of Health & Medicine).The lack of laboratory diagnostic tests for mental disorders, along with the shady marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry, are often viewed as the most fatal flaws in the medical practice of psychiatry. This is especially true among critics of psychiatry, but doctors in other medical specialties tend to have a dismal opinion of psychiatry1 as well (Fazel & Ebmeier, 2009). Widespread pe........ Read more »
Kapur S, Phillips AG, & Insel TR. (2012) Why has it taken so long for biological psychiatry to develop clinical tests and what to do about it?. Molecular psychiatry. PMID: 22869033
- July 27, 2012
- 04:18 AM
- 575 views
Online Gaming Addiction, Dysfunctional Families, and the Striatum
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Internet addiction is perceived to be an important problem in some Asian countries, including Taiwan and Korea. Fatal marathon sessions of online gaming, in particular, have drawn a lot of media attention. Most recently, a teen in Taiwan died after playing Diablo III for 40 straight hours in an internet cafe.Yen et al. (2010) speculated on potential cultural contributions to heavy internet use:Internet addiction has been found to be more prevalent in some Asian countries than in the United State........ Read more »
Han DH, Kim SM, Lee YS, & Renshaw PF. (2012) The effect of family therapy on the changes in the severity of on-line game play and brain activity in adolescents with on-line game addiction. Psychiatry research, 202(2), 126-31. PMID: 22698763
- July 14, 2012
- 04:48 AM
- 342 views
Brain Responses to Virtual Reality-Induced Hallucinations in Schizophrenia
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
What is it like to experience the frightening auditory and visual hallucinations characteristic of schizophrenia? Yellowlees and Cook (2006) developed a virtual reality program in Second Life based on interviews with schizophrenic patients. The researchers used this as a tool to educate the general public about schizophrenia, in order to increase understanding and reduce stigma. A video sample of the program can be viewed below.As you can see, these hallucinations are straight out of a horror mo........ Read more »
Kim JJ, Ku J, Lee H, Choi SH, & Kim IY. (2012) Distinct neural responses used to gain insight into hallucinatory perception in patients with schizophrenia. Journal of psychiatric research. PMID: 22770670
Yellowlees PM, & Cook JN. (2006) Education about hallucinations using an internet virtual reality system: a qualitative survey. Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry, 30(6), 534-9. PMID: 17139026
- July 8, 2012
- 08:25 PM
- 305 views
EMPowered to Kill
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Mentally ill killer tried vitamin therapy, court toldA man with schizophrenia killed his father and gravely injured his mother at their home in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Jordan Ramsay was off his prescribed antipsychotic medication at the time, instead taking an alternative multivitamin preparation called Truehope EMPowerplus™. He believed his parents were aliens and felt compelled to kill them. Ironically, Wendy and Donald Ramsay were in favor of their son's Truehope treatment. But J........ Read more »
Bohannon J. (2009) Psychology. The theory? Diet causes violence. The lab? Prison. Science (New York, N.Y.), 325(5948), 1614-6. PMID: 19779166
Gately D, Kaplan BJ. (2009) Database Analysis of Adults with Bipolar Disorder Consuming a Micronutrient Formula. Clinical Medicine: Psychiatry, 3-16. info:/
Kaplan BJ, Crawford SG, Field CJ, & Simpson JS. (2007) Vitamins, minerals, and mood. Psychological bulletin, 133(5), 747-60. PMID: 17723028
- June 17, 2012
- 08:37 PM
- 343 views
Textmania: a Modern Manifestation of Manic Hypergraphia?
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Continuing with the theme of reading and writing, a new study reports on the case of a 23 yr old woman with bipolar I disorder whose output of text messages was "1333.33% more" during a manic episode (Emeagwali et al., 2012):The patient reported a dramatic increase in the quantity of both texting and sex-texting (or sexting) in addition to a decrease in quality of the message content. In addition, there was a substantial increase in the number of people with whom the patient engaged in simultane........ Read more »
Kalamangalam, G. (2009) Hypergraphia in temporal lobe epilepsy. Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology, 12(3), 193. DOI: 10.4103/0972-2327.56323
Emeagwali, N., Bailey, R., & Azim, F. (2012) Textmania: Text Messaging During the Manic Phase of Bipolar I Disorder. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 23(2), 519-522. DOI: 10.1353/hpu.2012.0062
- June 4, 2012
- 07:27 PM
- 402 views
G r e a t e r / l e t t e r / s p a c i n g / helps reading in dyslexia
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Simply increasing the spacing between letters improves the reading ability of children with developmental dyslexia, according to a group of Italian and French researchers (Zorzi et al., 2012). Dyslexic children were 20% faster and twice as accurate when reading the altered text. This impressive result was obtained without any prior training whatsoever.The study was based on the phenomenon of crowding, where the recognition of individual letters is impaired by the close proximity of surrounding ........ Read more »
Marco Zorzi, Chiara Barbiero, Andrea Facoetti, Isabella Lonciari, Marco Carrozzi, Marcella Montico, Laura Bravar, Florence George, Catherine Pech-Georgel, and Johannes C. Ziegler. (2012) Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia. PNAS. info:/
- June 2, 2012
- 11:05 PM
- 265 views
Compulsion to write caused by seizure, whether at work or at leisure
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Hypergraphia is a compulsive or overwhelming urge to write, often associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. Influential behavioral neurologist Norman Geschwind included hypergraphia as one of the personality changes that can be observed in persons with temporal lobe epilepsy.An unusual example of hypergraphia was observed by Dr. Mario F. Mendez, who reported the unique case of a 58 year old man who felt utterly compelled to write poetry (Mendez, 2005). The patient reported no previous history of b........ Read more »
Mendez, M. (2005) Hypergraphia for Poetry in an Epileptic Patient. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 17(4), 560-561. DOI: 10.1176/appi.neuropsych.17.4.560
- May 18, 2012
- 12:24 AM
- 330 views
Blast Wave Injury and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy: What's the Connection?
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
Fig. 3 (Goldstein et al., 2012). Single-blast exposure induces CTE-like neuropathology in wild-type C57BL/6 mice.In a tour de force, a group of 35 Boston-area scientists1 (Goldstein et al., 2012) developed a mouse model of blast-related neurotrauma that resulted in pathological changes similar to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive neurodegenerative disease seen most often in athletes with repeated concussions. They also reported post-mortem neuropathological findings from th........ Read more »
Goldstein, L., Fisher, A., Tagge, C., Zhang, X., Velisek, L., Sullivan, J., Upreti, C., Kracht, J., Ericsson, M., Wojnarowicz, M.... (2012) Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Blast-Exposed Military Veterans and a Blast Neurotrauma Mouse Model. Science Translational Medicine, 4(134), 134-134. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3003716
- May 12, 2012
- 05:32 PM
- 457 views
An Orgy of Self-Referential Blogging...
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
...may follow from a new PLoS ONE paper on bloggers whose posts are aggregated at ResearchBlogging.org (Shema et al., 2012):The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.The Neurocritic has never been one for meta-blogging.1 I don't like to draw attention to my existence as an actual person, and I don't have time to discuss things like the pros/cons of blogging, scientific outreach, gender imbalances, scientist blo........ Read more »
Shema, H., Bar-Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2012) Research Blogs and the Discussion of Scholarly Information. PLoS ONE, 7(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035869
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