“New research suggests that teenage romance may have a profound influence on depression later in adolescence. In a small sample of eleventh grade girls, the risk of becoming depressed later in adolescence was related to the quality of the girls’ first romantic relationship, reported researchers… The results are based on a survey of 54 girls that focused on their current levels of depression, their age during their first romantic relationship, and the amount of intimacy and companionship they felt from that relationship. The authors found that girls who felt they had a less than ideal relationship based on measures of intimacy and companionship were more likely than others to be depressed during their late adolescence.” Yahoo! News

The Inner Savant: Physicist Allan Snyder’s new theory about the origins of the skills of autistic savants, covered here in this article from Discover, challenges the prevailing consensus that they are based on compulsive learning. He suggests that we may all have such latent abilities, but that it is some of the higher-order cognitive abilities we use most of the time, and in which people with autism are deficient, that interfere with the efficiency and rapidity of the brain’s natural processing powers. Some aspects of the theory account for thought-provoking phenomena — that there are cases of the spontaneous development of savant capacities after blows to the head; and that the deterioration of executive functions seen in frontotemporal dementia — which has an early, profound effect on linguistic competencies such as the naming of objects — can prompt the emergence of new interests and skills in music and art. By the way, I blinked to the BBC’s report of these findings in March, 2001.

Snyder is using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to “temporarily (inhibit) neural activity” and stimulate the development of such nonverbal skills in nonautistic individuals; a reader asked me what I thought of the plausibility and risks of such a practice. Its plausibility will, of course, have to be established by more extensive double-blind and placebo-controlled clinical trials (the control subjects receiving sham TMS). TMS, which has attracted both research and incipient clinical attention over the past decade, does affect brain functioning in profound ways, and is being investigated as a treatment tool for a variety of CNS dysfunctions, especially depression. But, if it works to develop ‘savant-like’ skills, I suspect that conceptualizing it as ‘turning off’ certain frontotemporal regions and releasing untapped brain potential will turn out to be a hopelessly reductionistic oversimplification. The brain remains a ‘black box’; when we see a manipulation work (a psychoactive drug, electroconvulsant therapy, hypnosis, psychoanalysis, or TMS…), we spin yarns about what must be going on inside the box to account for it, beautiful theories — beautiful because they compellingly enlist us in believing in their explanatory power (until challenged by a counterexample), not necessarily because they have any relationship to reality. I would particularly like to see functional MRI (fMRI) studies addressing exactly what changes to cortical activity occur in subjects receiving TMS. 

My greatest concern about TMS emanates from this rudimentary oversimplification about how it works and what it is doing in the brain. We have no way of knowing its longterm consequences, and the literature (which I have recently reviewed) is not extensive enough a body of knowledge to draw any reassuring conclusions. While several series have reported negative findings, there are case reports suggesting the induction of both absence (petit mal) and generalized (convulsive) seizures, the development of persistent memory deficits, and the induction of mania with repetitive TMS (rTMS). Most animal studies have failed to demonstrate tissue changes in lab animals exposed to TMS, but there is one study demonstrating brain damage in rats. Hearing loss in rabbits has been reported. Hormonal changes and changes in EEG brainwave recording indicative of alterations in brain function have not been found. You can do your own Medline search if you want to pursue this further. Here is similar BBC coverage of Allan Snyder and the ‘thinking cap’.

There are, of course, other techniques that arguably ‘turn off’ aspects of cortical functioning to defeat our conscious brain’s interference with more innate instinctual abilities. I’m reminded of the simple but powerful techniques for developing artistic skills pioneered in Betty Edwards’ 1989 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It appears from the article that similar techniques are being used by Snyder’s research group, seemingly uncredited to Edwards. Certain meditative and biofeedback techniques may also be analogous.

“The rise of the “nobody” memoir: ‘This spring there are more memoirs than last spring by, for want of a better term, “nobodies,” those who are neither generals, statesmen, celebrities nor their kin. So many have appeared as to elicit a parody of the genre—Daniel Harris’s A Memoir Of No One in Particular: In Which Our Author Indulges in Naive Indiscretions, A Self-Aggrandizing Solipsism, and An Off-Putting Infatuation with His Own Bodily Functions.‘ Lorraine Adams shares my opinion of that epitome of the genre (and darling of many of the weblogging set), Dave Eggers, ” whose Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a pony-wide micron-deep curl of a pseudo-Joycean memoir about the death of his parents (almost at the same time!) and his raising (at the age of 21!) his brother (only 7!).”

To more carefully analyze the nobody memoir, I developed a taxonomy of sorts, and determined, after entering more than 200 memoirs into a spreadsheet, that almost every “nobody” memoir sorts into three types. The largest by far is the childhood memoir—incestuous, abusive, alcoholic, impoverished, minority, “normal,” and the occasional privileged. The second largest type is the memoir of physical catastrophe—violence, quadriplegia, amputation, disease, death. The third is mental catastrophe—madness, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, brain damage.

My spreadsheet is more interesting for what it lacks. There are no memoirs of falling in love, marriages, weddings. There are no memoirs, as yet, of middle age. There are extremely few memoirs of careers. There are no memoirs of crimes. (The Son of Sam law effectively smothered that.) Memoirs of parenting are essentially memoirs of childhood, but only certain kinds—the impossible teenager, the child injured by genetic defects, disease, or accident. Abusive parents, sexual molesters, pedophiles—none have written memoirs. There are memoirs by teenage prostitutes, but not johns. There are memoirs by battered wives, but not batterers. There are no memoirs of revenge. There are no memoirs of jealousy. The prison memoir—a tradition still viable—is a disappearing species. The African-American memoir—while alive in the hands of Debra Dickerson or Henry Louis Gates—has tapered off from a heyday bookended by slave narratives and Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler. Washington Monthly

The Day Is Past and Gone: “The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was once a vanguard of modern dance. Now it is a mouthpiece for identity politics.” — Jennifer Homans The New Republic (long)

No Sales Depression

“After more than a year’s delay, (Wilco)’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, will be released April 23. But impatient fans have not had to wait: Wilco offered the album for free on the Web six months ago, and it has since been vigorously traded on peer-to-peer networks, making it the best test to date of the Internet’s culpability in the current record-industry slump. If the album sells despite having been released online, the industry could lose its favorite scapegoat–and have to focus attention on other explanations for the current listless state of CD sales.” The New Republic

Scientists warn of Himalayan floods:

‘More than 40 lakes high in the Himalayas, formed from rapidly melting glaciers, are expected to burst their banks in the next five years, sending millions of gallons of water and rock cascading on to settlements in the valleys below, scientists warned yesterday.

The lakes are growing larger and more unstable as rising temperatures in the world’s highest mountain range, caused by global warming, lead to “a geological crisis”, the scientists say.’ Guardian UK

US ‘gave the nod’ to Venezuelan coup — “The Bush administration was under intense scrutiny yesterday for its role in last weekend’s abortive coup in Venezuela, after admitting that US officials had held a series of meetings in recent months with Venezuelan military officers and opposition activists.” Not surprising; the only question is whether it was just a wink and a nod, or more substantive encouragement and assistance. Guardian UK

“A woman describes her ecstatic conversion to Christian fundamentalism and her slow, difficult journey out again” — review of This Dark World by Carolyn S. Briggs:

Briggs is also refreshingly open about the ways in which her faith was somewhat childlike and oversimplified: “I worried that God was mocked in some way every time I did not obey Him. And the opposite was true as well. Every time I obeyed God, the angels would fall at His feet in adoration. (‘Oh, God, you are truly great. Even Carolyn obeys you!’) I imagined the cosmos swirling about me, all eyes on the little gladiator of faith.” Salon

Via Declan McCullagh’s PoliTech mailing list, the news that a patent has been issued for “a method of swinging on a swing… in which a user … induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other. The patent description includes this gem: “Lastly, it should be noted that because pulling alternately on one chain and then the other resembles in some measure the movements one would use to swing from vines in a dense jungle forest, the swinging method of the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as “Tarzan” swinging. The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required.”