The neural correlates of person familiarity. More interesting and powerful findings from functional MRI. Comparing the brain activation patterns of people seeing familiar vs. unfamiliar faces, and listening to familiar vs. unfamiliar voices, reveals the neural correlates of familiarity or recognition — areas of the posterior cingulate gyrus of the cortex, for those who know neuroanatomy. I have long been interested in the dramatic psychotic symptom called Capgras’ delusion, which involves the belief that familiar others have been replaced by nearly — but not quite — identical duplicates. Extreme cases in which the patient was convinced that their entire city was replaced by a near-duplicate have been described. The deep resonances of this terrifying experience are reflected in such classic films as Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the panic-stricken protagonists cannot convince others that people around them are being replaced or controlled.(Of course, on another level, films of this ilk are talked about in the context of our Cold War societal complex about Communist brainwashing and takeover — which may be coming back into fashion — but that’s a different story; I think they speak to something far more primal.) It has long been observed that the Capgras delusion occurs both in “functional” psychoses (e.g. schizophrenia) and a variety of “organic” conditions (e.g. carbon monoxide poisoning). Back in psychiatry’s dark ages of either/or, this was one of the early suggestions that functional mental illnesses were diseases of the brain as much as of the mind.

I have been suggesting for a long time that the Capgras symptom arises from a disorder of the machinery underlying the sense of familiarity in the brain, and that it might have some similarity to other so-to-speak delusions of unfamiliarity. For example, there is a class of paranoid patients whose concerns revolve around the conviction that people come into their homes while the patient is asleep or out, rearranging or absconding with things there. I suspect that the failure of these patients to retain a sense of familiarity about the arrangement or placement of the objects in their environment is the basis of their belief that things have been meddled with. There is also a particular set of paranoid fears that arises as memory and familiarity fade with the progression of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. There is also a symptom called derealization, in which people have a strange sense that the world around them is not real but a caricature or cartoon version of itself; they cannot articulate percisely what is different, but they know it is. This often occurs in temporal lobe epilepsy, which can involve the cingulate gyrus, and is related to frequent deja vu experiences, clearly a disorder of the sense of familiarity. Now, with the demonstration of neural correlates of the experience of familiarity, even if no new treatment interventions arise, a convincing explanation may at least some of the time be a comfort to the patients so afflicted, or their families. As an aside, I’m curious to see whether the more disembodied familiarity of media celebrities is subsumed by the same machinery as the more intimate experience of the familiarity of our associates, friends and family. Brain

An FmH reader writes that this is probably the real reason San Diego is dropping the use of the word ‘minority’ in its documents. “Yes, I think this should be derided, but not for the reason you give“, he says, alluding to my lampooning such apparent political correctness.

Monsanto v. Percy Schmeiser. A disturbing story to which I was originally pointed by jimwich, here summarized on Tompaine.com. 40% of farmers in Western Canada, including farmer Percy Schmeiser’s neighbors, grow generically modified canola. Pollen from his neighbors’ fields blew onto his land and, when Monsanto took seed samples from his canola crop without his permission and found “their” genes, they sued under Canadian patent law that makes it illegal to re-use patented seeds without a licensing agreement. Now Schmeiser is forced to pay thousands of dollars in royalties on GM seeds found on his land without his having bought the seeds or benefited from their inadvertent presence in his crop (they were engineered to be resistant to a Monsanto weed killer Schmeiser does not use). IMHO, this story, perhaps the first of many in Monsanto’s promised draconian crackdown on “seed-savers”, illustrates the real disaster of agribusiness giants’ taking proprietary control of crop genomes through GM. Placing the burden of assuring non-contamination with GM materials on the individual producer is an insidious means of crushing independent competition. This is far more worrisome than speculative and largely misplaced concerns over direct biological effects of engineered genes on the foodchain.

“…some of the most extremely violent rhetoric, from both sides, that
I’ve ever heard between a government and a terrorist organization…” “Muslim extremists who have been holding
an American hostage for the past eight months threatened to behead
their captive and send the head as a birthday present to President
Arroyo Thursday.

The Abu Sayyaf said the head of Jefrrey Schilling, the 25-year-old
Oakland, California native whom the group has held in the jungles
of Sulu since August last year, will be sent as “a gift” to the President
for her 54th birthday.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Arroyo declared yesterday all-out war against the
Abu Sayyaf rebels and ordered troops to take no prisoners unless the
bandits surrendered.” Phillipine Star A discussion thread on Plastic in reaction to this story suggests that the hostage is apparently an American Muslim who sought out the rebels himself “to hang out with them,” then got into trouble because he couldn’t answer their questions on Islamic doctrine.

San Diego will drop use of word ‘minority’ in its documents. Calling someone a minority implies that he or she is inferior, says sponsor of the measure which passed the San Diego City Council unanimously yesterday. “Schoolteachers and others, often
unconsciously, expect less of those who are labeled members of minority
groups. Those classified as minorities may even expect less of themselves…” No more consciousness-raising; the only politically correct solution these days is consciousness-lowering.

Do you believe this? We Deliver is an online drug dealing service that “got a really, really good idea”, they say, by reading the U.S. Postal Code closely. It turns out that the Netherlands legalized euthanasia in November, 2000. It also turns out that postal inspectors in the U.S. are “prohibited from the internal examination of any
package containing the remains of a human whose life
be deemed legally and prematurely ended from without
the borders of the United States”, a provision originally intended to insure that the remains of soldiers who die abroad are unimpeded in getting back to their grieving families. So We Deliver hooks you up with the ashes of your long-lost and recently-euthanized Dutch relatives, they say. “…For a reasonable fee, we
set it up so that a guy in Amsterdam will send you a
little bit of the deceased’s ashes. And he’ll measure out
the exact amount of ounces (or pounds) of ashes that
you wanna order, put it in a box, slap on an official
Netherlands ‘Euthanized Remains – Urgent’ sticker and
send it to yer address.” You receive your package, open it and, lo and behold, find that the shipper goofed and it is not ashes but an equivalent weight of some other ‘stuff’. “Of course you might still be a little skeptical. You don’t
know for sure if we legit. And that’s why we givin’
away a free joint to everyone who signs up for our
newsletter before 4/20/01. Try it out, see if you like it,
and then see if you don’t come back. We Deliver, y’all.” [via Plastic]

Read Any Good Pictures Lately? In Reading Pictures: a history of love and hate, a sequel to his A History of Reading, Argentinian writer and critic Alberto Manguel “coax(es) every possible allusion from the shadows… deconstruct(ing) the picture’s meaning for the artist while enriching the viewer’s understanding of what we are looking at, and why our responses can be so intense and complex”, in a meandering, eclectic way. The Independent