I recently interacted with a person who is depressed (I’ve had a lot of exposure to people with depression over the years but I want to write about one in particular). This person was a pleasant person but a bit dysthymic in general; this person came across as somewhat down and depressed. Recently he started taking bupropion (Wellbutrin) for depression. It’s made a world of difference. Now he appears euthymic and quite animated – it’s a good change. I know that anti-depressant medications are not effective for everyone (and I am fairly critical of psychotropic medications in general and don’t think any should be taken lightly) but in this case, the improvement was marked. It was like night and day. Wellbutrin, incidentally, is also an effective medication for helping people stop smoking (trademark name of Zyban). I have no affiliation with GlaxoSmithKline, who makes the drug (it’s also available as a generic), I just recently witnessed its effectiveness.
Alien Limb Syndrome
Book Review – Leadership and Self-deception: Getting Out of the Box
I’m going to preface my review by stating that the book I’m going to review is not directly about psychology; it has nothing to do with neuroscience. However, it has everything to do with interpersonal relationships and social interactions, which are two areas frequently addressed in psychology. I do not have any affiliation with The Arbinger Institute; I just enjoyed the book.
The book Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box
The main character in the book is Tom, a recently-hired mid to upper level manager at the fictional company Zagrum. Throughout the book Tom mainly interacts with two other characters – Bud, his boss who is the executive vice president of the company, and Kate, Zagrum’s president. Both Bud and Kate take time out of their busy schedules to train Tom about “the box”, which is self-deception.
The gist of the book is that much conflict between people is based on self-betrayal and self-deception. It comes from viewing other people as objects, as “things” that either help or hinder our own progress. The self-deception is that we are more important than other people and that they only exist to help us (or at least not stop us) self-actualize (I’m using different terms than used in the book; the author(s) of the book are not particularly fond of the humanistic concept of self-actualization, by the way). However, we deceive ourselves when we think that if we want to have improved relationships with others – especially if they are strained – then it is others who need to change and not ourselves.
Self-betrayal occurs, according to the author(s), when we are not true to that part of ourselves that is other-centered; this results in self-centeredness. In the book the author(s) give an example of how self-betrayal occurs. I’ll summarize that example.
At night a husband and wife are sleeping. The husband wakes up when the baby in the other room starts to cry. The husband’s first thought is to get up and get the child before his wife wakes up; after all, she works so hard all day and needs all the sleep she can get. The husband’s next thought though is that he too works hard all day and needs to get up early for a meeting. “Why should I get up? My responsibility in this family is to go to work and earn money so we can live. I need all the sleep I can get so I can function at my job – I have a big project to complete tomorrow. [Baby continues to cry]. Why doesn’t my wife get up and get that baby? Doesn’t she realize I need to get sleep? Okay, I know she’s awake now. Why doesn’t she get up? Now she’s just being lazy. [And so on].
These types of thoughts often become self-fulfilling prophecies, such that all our our own actions and thoughts inflate our self-worth (i.e., we do see ourselves as good, hard-working people) while simultaneously deflating the self-worth of another (i.e., we attribute certain attributes to them – “lazy” or “inconsiderate” – and then much of what we see them do after that only supports that hypothesis). While this specific example has not occurred with everyone, we have all experienced similar situations. Maybe the situation is at work where you had a thought that you should do something but then didn’t do it. When it created a problem you were able to rationalize your behavior and blame someone else (“I would have done X had Susan done her job” or “I was just too busy with other things to get X done.”). Basically, self-betrayal results from not being true to what you [hopefully] know is the right thing to do. When we don’t do what we know is right, the normal human response is to rationalize and justify our action or inaction in order to protect our egos, per se. This leads to us shifting the blame from ourselves onto others. We start to view others as hindering our progress; when this occurs they stop being people and start being objects (in other words, people are viewed as either starting blocks or stumbling blocks – they help or hinder us).
It is relatively straightforward to see how this can lead to interpersonal problems – at home or at work. The problem is that we do not know that we are betraying and deceiving ourselves, so we continue to ascribe most of our problems to others. The author(s) further points out that even if we recognize our self-betrayal and self-deception, we never will completely be free of these behaviors; however, we will be able to reduce these negative behaviors and improve our relationships with others.
Overall, this book provides an important and novel way to approach interpersonal behavior. The overarching message is that we should not worry about changing others (or even ourselves! – but I’ll let you read the book to understand that); we should instead recognize that the problem lies within ourselves and go from there. One very creative application of this philosophy is how this is being applied in businesses to increase productivity, human relations, public relations, and even the profitability of the company. I’ll let my readers read this book to understand how this philosophical approach to other-interaction can help a business make more money.
One of my criticisms of this approach to interpersonal behaviors is that it is fairly esoteric and difficult to grasp conceptually. That’s not necessarily a negative; however, it means that most people will really have to study and ponder on the concepts in order to understand them. The book also only serves as a brief – but important – introduction to the topic, leaving one a bit unsure exactly how to implement this new attitude and these new behaviors in one’s own life (although, there is enough information in the book that an astute reader can understand enough to follow this method of interpersonal interaction). This is where the Arbinger Institute’s training workshops and seminars come in. Additionally, C. Terry Warner wrote a book called Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves, which is a more complete description of the concepts found in Leadership and Self-deception.
I recommend the book Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box
Video site for watching surgeries
I’m quite fascinated by human anatomy, especially neuroanatomy. The human body is amazing; it’s something of a miracle that it develops and works as well and as often as it does. The brain is very complex with up to 100 million neurons (that’s also an estimate of the number of stars in our galaxy) and 100 trillion synapses (connections between neurons)! 100 trillion is an estimate of how many individual cells the entire human body has. We have as many synapses as cells in the entire body. The brain is complex and beautiful. It has symmetry but individuality.
I discovered a website that allows you to watch some surgeries live (or to view archives of past surgeries). OR-Live.com is informational and free. For those interested in neurosurgeries – everything from scoliosis surgery to tumor resection to deep brain stimulation – here is the direct link. Most of the videos are available in Flash format for web-viewing. Many are also available to download as a video podcast. Warning – please don’t watch the videos if you get queasy easily; if you feel queasy while watching one, take a break and do something else for a while.
I hope my readers enjoy this site as much as I have in the past and will continue to in the future.
Banjo Pickin’ Brain Surgery
Mo at Neurophilosophy posted a great video of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery being performed on a man with essential tremor, while he plays the banjo. As with most brain surgeries, the patient was awake, alert, and talking. The doctors had him play the banjo so they could fine tune (pun intended) the electrode placement in order to have the best response.
Mental Health Parity – Finally!
Here’s the American Psychological Association press release about the recently passed mental health parity law in the U.S. This is great news for insured people suffering from mental health disorders as well as for psychologists who will now be able to receive better reimbursement for services provided. Here’s a NYTimes article on the bill.
WASHINGTON—President Bush signed mental health parity into law today, taking a great step forward in the decade-plus fight to end insurance discrimination against those seeking treatment for mental health and substance use disorders. This historic legislation requires that health insurance equally cover both mental and physical health.
Congress passed the legislation as part of a new bill that also includes tax extenders, changes to FDIC and the controversial financial rescue plan. The House passed the legislation today by a vote of 263-171. On October 1, the measure passed the Senate by a vote of 74-25.
“With passage of this bill, insurance companies can no longer arbitrarily limit the number of hospital days or outpatient treatment sessions, or assign higher copayments or deductibles for those in need of psychological services,” said Dr. Katherine Nordal, the American Psychological Association’s (APA) executive director for professional practice.
For over a decade, the APA has worked with Congress to achieve a full mental health parity law ending discrimination in health insurance coverage against those suffering from mental health disorders.
The 2008 bill closes several of the loopholes left by the 1996 Mental Health Parity Act and extends equal coverage to all aspects of health insurance plans. It preserves existing state parity and consumer protection laws while extending protection of mental health services to 82 million Americans not protected by state laws. The bill also ensures mental health coverage for both in-network and out-of-network services.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 57 million Americans suffer from a mental health disorder. According to a 2008 nationwide survey by Harris Interactive in conjunction with the APA, 25 percent of Americans do not have adequate access to mental health services and 44 percent either do not have mental health coverage or are not sure if they do.
Additionally, a 2006 survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Agency reports that 49 percent of U.S. adults with both serious psychological distress and a substance use disorder go without treatment.
“Research shows that physical health is directly connected to emotional health and millions of Americans know that suffering from a mental health disorder can be as frightening and debilitating as any major physical health disorder,” said Dr. Nordal. “It’s our hope that passage of this bill will force our health care system to finally start treating the whole person, both mind and body.”
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world’s largest association of psychologists. APA’s membership includes more than 148,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.
Decomposing Statistics
Statistics are used by all but understood by few. In fact, studies have shown that 94% of people have little to no understanding of statistical methods. OK, that last statistic was made up; I wrote it to make a point though. I could post something like that on this blog and people would believe it and possibly even repeat it. The sad thing is that it probably isn’t that far from reality. In social science and neuroscience research we use statistics to understand data and support hypotheses. This post will serve as a statistical primer. I will not discuss how to calculate statistics, rather I will write about the underlying assumptions and theory of statistics. I will also discuss how to properly use and understand them (and hopefully avoid misusing them). I hope to help you become a more informed consumer of statistics.
When did we start using statistics and why?
Joel Best wrote a brief history of the use of statistics in his excellent book Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers From the Media, Politicians, and Activists. [I urge everyone to read the book to be more informed about statistics. All quotes will be from the book. It provides only a superficial treatment of actual statistical methods – which he states is the case – but it provides a good theoretical background for being a critical thinker about statistics]. He states that statistics rose in popularity as governments and social activists wanted ways to track and “influence debates over social issues” (p.11). Early statistics were used almost exclusively for political purposes, especially to shape social and governmental policies. From the beginning, statistics were used for non-neutral purposes. They gave credibility to arguments.
One assumption that people erroneously make is that statistics are neutral and that they represent truth. They are useful for aggregating a lot of data but the problem is that most statistical methods are based on certain assumptions about the underlying data (e.g., that it is normally-distributed). However, many times researchers use certain statistical methods and make conclusions based on those data when the methods are not appropriate for the data. Even simple descriptive statistics (e.g., averages) can lead to people making erroneous conclusions.
People who create statistics all have a purpose for them. Researchers are all biased and have agendas. It just may be to get their research published or it might be for other ulterior reasons. Social activists use statistics to create social problems (see p. 14); they are not the cause of the “problem” but they try to raise awareness of it by turning it into a “problem” that we need to pay attention to and solve. This can often be a good thing but activists are using statistics to give credibility to their cause (e.g., “According to the World Health Organization, between 12 percent and 25 percent of women around the world have experienced sexual violence at some time in their lives.” source). Governments also use statistics to defend their position (e.g., “Crime rates decreased by XX% from last year. See! we are doing our job.”) and sometimes to counter the claims of activists.
The media pick up on statistics, on activists, because they present a new story and might even be controversial and controversy sells. Businesses also use statistics to promote their causes. Not everyone or entity will collect data in the same way either – one police station might have different criteria for counting an assault than another one has.
The author Best proposes three general questions to ask when seeing a statistic used.
- Who created this statistic?
- Why was this statistic created?
- How was this statistic created? (pp. 27-28).
Many times people don’t even know enough to ask those questions or to research the answers to those questions. After all, as Best points out, we are largely an innumerate society (this holds true world-wide). Innumeracy is the math equivalency of illiteracy. A majority of people are uncomfortable with even basic mathematics and completely oblivious to statistics. After all, mathematics is abstract and requires a lot of mental effort to use and understand. It is often not taught as well as it can and only reluctantly learned in school. Once out of school, people rarely need to use more than basic math and so they forget what they learned. The other problem that we have is that we accept math (and by extension, statistics) to be perfect and infallible (Gödel demonstrated in effect that this is not the case). Best describes this fallacy:
“We sometimes talk about statistics as though they are facts that simply exist, like rocks, completely independent of people, and that people gather statistics much as rock collectors pick up stones. That is wrong. All statistics are created through people’s actions: people have to decide what to count and how to count it, people have to do the counting and the other calculations, and people have to interpret the resulting statistics, to decide what the numbers mean. All statistics are social products, the results of people’s efforts” (p.27; emphasis added).
So what do you do when you view a news program on TV or read an article or hear an activist or politician quote a statistic? If it makes you go, “Wow!” then that is one sign you need to step back and really scrutinize it (which you should do even if it doesn’t surprise/scare/etc. you). If you agree with the point the show, article, or person is trying to make then you really need to step back and critique the statistic. This means you need to understand your biases. It is easy to only want to confirm our hypotheses and beliefs and ignore anything that might contradict them. This is generally adaptive to help us process a lot of information but it can be a problem when we don’t critically view statistics, especially when they are “bad statistics” (which you can never discover without critiquing them). When you view or read a statistic, that is the time to ask yourself those 3 questions Best proposed and go from there. You might discover something interesting.
I’ll post more on this subject later.
Reference
Best, J. (2001). Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers From the Media, Politicians, and Activists. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA.
An Introduction to and Overview of the Brain
The human brain is a wondrous thing. It is the single most complex organ on the planet. It sits atop the spinal cord. Gazing upon the brain, one sees four main distinct areas – two roughly symmetrical hemispheres, a cerebellum stuck up underneath the posterior part of the brain, and a brainstem sticking out and down from the middle of the brain. Each cerebral hemisphere is divided into four visible lobes: frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital. The frontal lobes jut out at nearly a 90 degree angle from the spinal cord and are the largest part of the human brain. The temporal lobes stick out the sides of the brain, like thumbs pointing forward at the side of a fist. The parietal lobes are harder to distinguish. They are just posterior to the frontal lobes and dorsal to (above) the temporal lobes. The occipital lobes are at the very back of the brain, like a caboose on a train.
The outside of the brain is covered with a series of bumps and grooves. The bumps are called gyri (sing. gyrus) whereas the grooves are called sulci (sing. sulcus). This outside part of the brain is filled with tiny cell bodies of neurons, the main functional cell of the brain. Some people estimate that there are 100 billion neurons in the central nervous system (brain + spinal cord). This outer layer of the brain is called the cortex (which means “bark”). The cortex is only about 5mm thick, or about the thickness of a stack of 50 sheets of copy paper, yet it is responsible for much of the processing of information in the brain.
At room temperature the brain is the consistency of warm cream cheese. If removed from the skull and placed on a table, it would flatten and widen out a bit, like jello that is warming up. The brain is encased in a series of protective sheaths called meninges. The outermost encasing is called the dura mater (L. “tough mother”), which is thick and tough and is attached to the skull. The next layer in is softer. It is called the arachnoid layer; it adheres to the brain. Just underneath this layer is where cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flows. This fluid is produced in holes in the middle of the brain called ventricles. CSF helps cushion the brain as well as remove waste products from the brain. Underneath this is a very thin and fine layer called the pia mater (L. “soft mother”), which adheres directly to the cortex and is difficult or impossible to remove without damaging the cortex. These three layers of meninges serve to protect the brain.
The brain can be roughly split into three functional areas, each one more “advanced” than the previous. The brainstem (and midbrain), which includes such structures as the medulla, pons, and thalamus, activates and regulates the general arousal of the cortex. Damage to the brainstem often results in coma or death. The next rough functional area is the posterior portion of the brain (parietal and occipital lobes and portions of the temporal lobes). This area is heavily involved in sensory processing – touch, vision, hearing. It sends information to other parts of the brain largely through the midbrain structures. The last functional area includes the frontal lobes. This area can regulate all other parts of the brain but is essential for goal-setting, behavior inhibition, motor movements, and language. The frontal lobes are the most advanced area of the brain and arguably the most important for human functioning – for what makes us human. In summary the three areas roughly are responsible for:
- Overall arousal and regulation
- Sensory input
- Output, control, and planning
Underneath the cortex is a large area of the brain that looks white. This area is comprised of the axons of the neurons of the cortex and subcortical structures. These axons are the pathways between neurons – like superhighways connecting cities. The axons look white because the majority are covered with a fatty tissue called myelin. Myelin helps axons work more efficiently and transmit more quickly. The white matter of the brain is as important for normal brain functioning as the gray (neurons) matter is.
The brain is energy-hungry. It cannot store energy so it needs a constant supply of nutrients from blood. However, blood can be toxic* to neurons so the brain has to protect itself from the blood and other toxic materials through what is called the blood-brain barrier. This barrier keeps blood cells out of the brain but allows molecules of nutrients (e.g., glucose) to pass into or feed the cells. The entire surface of the brain is covered with blood vessels, with many smaller vessels penetrating deep into the brain to feed the subcortical structures. Deoxygenated blood must be removed from the brain. Veins take the blood out of the brain and drain into venous sinuses, which are part of the dura matter.
The brain works as a whole to help us sense, perceive, interact with, and understand our world around us. It is beautiful in its form and function.
*”Today, we accept the view that the BBB limits the entry of plasma components, red blood cells, and leukocytes into the brain. If they cross the BBB due to an ischemic injury, intracerebral hemorrhage, trauma, neurodegenerative process, inflammation, or vascular disorder, this typically generates neurotoxic products that can compromise synaptic and neuronal functions (Zlokovic, 2005, Hawkins and Davis, 2005 and Abbott et al., 2006).” From Zlokovic, B. V. (2008). The blood-brain barrier in health and chronic neurodegenerative disorders. Neuron, 57(2), 178-201.
Image: Bi Sang by Seung Ji Baek
Site Going Through Revisions
I’m working on finding a new look for my site. It will be going through revisions over the next few days as I get everything situated. Please forgive any bumps in the process.