Social Networks Protect Against Alzheimer’s (ScienceDaily)

Brain training can change autistic behaviour (New Scientist)

Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.

“In 2005 I heard that… “ (London Review of Books)

As someone who has shaved only three times in the last thirty years (on Jan. 1, 1981; Jan. 1, 1991; and Jan. 1, 2001), I am envious that I will likely not be partaking in the phenomenon of the Epicurean shave…

A review of Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett, Uncollected interviews with Samuel Beckett and memories of those who knew him, edited by James Knowlson and Elizabeth Knowlson:

Not that I liken myself to Beckett, but the personal resonances for me are powerful…

But this is not just about why we feel the need to ‘explain’ art:

As Perry concludes, “I wonder if a similar dialogue went on in someone’s head that started: “I fancy invading Iraq in the name of enlightened democracy.””

If there are problems with science-for-humanities-students courses (commonly referred to as “physics for poets”) (Inside Higher Ed), what about humanities for budding scientists? (New York Times )

As a Whorfian, who believes that the language we use to describe it shapes our thought about any endeavor, I have often written about the profound impact of the diagnostic system used in psychiatry, codified in the ‘bible’ (or perhaps it would be more apt to say ‘Chinese restaurant menu’) called the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Among other things, it cements the hegemony of the biological psychiatrists over the mental health field. Now a new study (by a non-psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist) reveals that “every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses”. The study dovetails my concern with classificatory schemes to another of my rants about modern psychiatry — how it is in the hip pocket of the pharmaceutical industry’s profit machine.

But it is not as if Big Pharma planted its hired guns on the DSM authorship committee to do its bidding, and the study does not establish whether the experts’ financial ties to the industry predated and shaped their involvement in the DSM or resulted from their visibility and achievement. I think it is more likely the latter. The psychotropic drug manufacturers tend to offer their perks — paid speaking engagements, research and consulting contracts — to established authorities in the field. For example, Eli Lily would be interested in subsidizing psychiatrists whose research serves its interests, such as someone who supports the notion that certain premenstrual problems deserve codification as psychaitric disorders when it is interested in using its drug Prozac to treat those disorders. Given that corporate penetration into psychiatric nosology has grown explosively in the past two decades or so, the planned fifth revision of the DSM due out in around five years will be the first to be appreciably tainted by this issue. The American Psychiatric Association (publisher of the DSM)’s decision to require its authors to disclose their financial ties, if there is any honesty about those disclosures, should at least answer the chicken-and-egg question of whether industry subsidy is in place at the time of a psychiatrist’s contribution to the DSM.

The weaker dismissal of concern, such as influential psychiatrist John Kane’s comment that the work of his subpanel on schizophrenia was driven only by science —

— is embarrassing. given that behavioral science research design goes to such lengths to eliminate subtle unconscious biases that shape outcomes. Perhaps it should be seen as the effort to drive the final nail into the coffin of the psychoanalytic roots of psychiatry, Freud’s notion of the mysterious and opaque power of unconscious processes?

Kane and others suggest that the mere revelation of financial ties should not undermine the public’s confidence in psychiatry. In a sense he is right; confidence has long ago been undermined. This, however, may be one of the last straws. Psychiatric care is about helping patietns to take appropriate responsibility for their actions. Physician, heal thyself.

But why Rolling Stone??

Frank Furedi’s essay takes us to task for our ‘loss of faith in humanity’ and our ‘neo-Malthusian doom and gloom’. Furedi opines that the new misanthropy threatens to make us scared of ourselves, and that we face a choice between resigning ourselves to a ‘culture of fatalism’ or rousing ourselves toward ‘taking control of our futures’. He takes heart in the idea that the human ability to recognize and label evil “shows that we are capable of rectifying acts of injustice.”

Furedi is one of the sp!ked [and isn’t the spelling ever-so-cutesy?] crew whose purpose in life seems to be waging a front-liine battle against any upwelling of the culture of fear and whose sole modus operandi the donning of rose-colored glasses. Ironically, he does not see that the misanthropic strain he decries is the very voice of that human ability to recognize wrongs, as the first step in rectification. Being scared not only of the potential to cock things up royally but — look around — the mess we have made in actuality is necessary, and I pity those who are so hellbent on avoiding that distress that they stick their heads in the sand as deeply as these folks do. Furedi pleads for faith in human potential and belief in the advantages of civilized modernity, and he sounds like nothing so much as an apologist for the status quo — a sheep in wolves’ clothing.

Almost two decades-worth of computer processor time went into figuring out what happens… (abc.net.au)

A consideration of the miraculous complexity of the clotting cascade is an opportunity to reflect on ‘intelligent design’ as the logic of ignorance: Steve Jones, paraphrasing Darwin, says that Intelligent Design proponents look at an organic being “as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond their comprehension”. It reminds me of something a philosopher patient of mine said to me today — “There is no excuse for ignorance, but even less for knowledge without action.”

New photos of ‘Argentinian Nessie’ (Cryptomundo [via boing boing])

“The 90 million chocolate bunnies made for Easter, and the millions more chocolate eggs in the basket, have focused attention again on whether chocolate is a plus or minus for health.” This comes up each year around Valentine’s Day, Easter and Halloween, although for many of us chocolate consumption knows no season. The cardiovascular and antioxidant benefits of chocolate derive from the cocoa itself, and may be offset by the fat and sugar content. Some suggest drinking a cup of cocoa instead. (Medpage Today)

D-Link spokespeople are “aware of the problem” but otherwise evasive as to why they are doing this on a scale no one else apparently has ever felt the need, or had the nerve, to do. Is the company run by an obsessional?

Who believes, first of all, that there is a distinction between policy and politics in the Bush dysadministration; and, second of all, that Rove will curtail any of his areas of advice to the Shrub just because his designation has changed? Oh, wait a minute, the American public believe that!

“Parks ‘Glide Path’ to Impoverishment Breaks Bush Campaign Pledge”

Sunday Times interview: “Out in the field, as he so often is, he spends the nights in tents listening to music. Before iPods changed everything, he took CDs, always including some demanding music he had never heard — say, Janacek quartets. In the darkness, he would reach for a CD and put it on, not knowing what it was. If he couldn’t stand what he heard, he would grope for another. But he allowed himself to do this only twice. The rule was that he must listen to the third CD. “I had to sit through it, that had to be it. It was a little game.””

Map your ZIP Code in Google Maps, using US Census Bureau data.

Related:

Mapping Religion in America

Remarkable county-by-county graphical depictions of various religious moieties in America (Regions of Mind)

…than to type on your keyboard, as one wag pointing to this site put it. Of course, it appears to be a thinly disguised advert for a brand of disinfecting wipes. (MarketWire)

Map your ZIP Code in Google Maps, using US Census Bureau data.

Related:

Mapping Religion in America

Remarkable county-by-county graphical depictions of various religious moieties in America (Regions of Mind)

The emphasis of this Guardian report is that Britain took part in the Pentagon’s mock Iran invasion “…despite repeated claims by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, that a military strike against Iran is inconceivable.” Regardless of what one might feel about more British toadyism, the more basic issue is the evidence this constitutes of Pentagon planning for the Iranian invasion beginning as soon as the ‘mission” was “accomplished” in neighboring Iraq. Or did they set their sights on both and plan the two wars in parallel, even earlier?

“OK, now we know the ‘neural correlates’ of stigma, what shall we do with that information? What does it mean??” (The Neurocritic)

By the way, has anyone developed a taste for the guarana soft drink, Bawls?

Arianna Huffington says we face a challenge in embracing former rightwing ideologues as they change their positions on issues like Iraq. She mentions Newt Gingrich and Francis Fukuyama to start. This was a lesson learned by those of us in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War which should not have to be learned all over again. Do we want to stop the war? I agree we should embrace penitant reformed jingoists.

Huffington (who is no stranger herself to the derision provoked by changing one’s stripes; one might argue that there is no zeal like that of the converted) parses the quandary about doing so as being one between pragmatism and “anti-war purity,” which I think gives perhaps abit too much credit to those who do not accept the ‘converts’, making them sound a little tooo high-minded. What she describes as “launching a full-scale, dig-up-all-the-old-dirt attack on those who publicly change their position on the war” is often based not on ideological purity but more primal feelings such as contemtp, ragefulness, spite, and narcissism.

I know I have often been guilty of that holier-than-thou attitude, and I continue to stand by my public position about the impossibility of meaningful dialogue with most of the wingnuts on the right (which I think is a reasonable position to take in the face of their unreasonableness). But Huffington’s post reminded me that our work in the Vietnam-era antiwar movement was inherently wedded to work on ourselves, on empathy and compassion and overcoming our own hatreds. It was much more organically embedded in a counterculture and a social justice, as well as peace, movement. It makes me second-guess even my own calls, as we ramp up to an attack on Iran, for the growth of a massive peace movement, makes me wonder if it would fail if not rooted in a broader social change movement.

“A new optical telescope designed solely to detect light signals from alien civilisations has opened for work at the Harvard Smithsonian.” (BBC)

“This Video Of President Bush, Speaking This Morning, Presented Entirely Without Comment, Except That You Should Watch For The Part Where He Pants Like A Dog Toward The End.” (Philadelphia Weekly via Just Between Strangers)

Caveat emptor: you get what you pay for. IMHO, most free offers are not worth the effort.

As profound a question as why the sky is blue, although it didn’t occur to us to ask until the ’70’s when we could see the whole earth from space.

Related:

Outsourcing the drive-through. (New York Times )

Bush makes this clumsy denial just like he told us all how reprehensible leaks are. Furthermore, ‘speculative’ predictions do not necessarily prove false.

Fred Kaplan decodes our options as follows (highly telescopic; read the article):

“So-called near-death experiences — the widely reported sensations, in times of peril, of floating above the body, seeing a white light, and having a sensation of peace — may be related to poorly regulated arousal systems in the brain, according to researchers here.” (MedPage Today) Yes, I think it would be fair to call near-death a state of poorly-regulated arousal…

The article makes much of the fact that most people today know the word is derogatory but few feel it is vulgar, being largely ignorant of its origin as a term for a condom. I was amazed to find that the Oxford English Dictionary dates the term back only to 1967, with the first noted use to mean ‘despicable’ in 1971. I was a child in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s experimenting, as we all did unless we were brought up in the finest homes, with vulgarity and scatology, and already back then calling someone a ‘scumbag’ brought that frisson of using a forbidden word otherwise reserved for c-words, s-words, b-words and f-words. Maybe it took awhile to diffuse across the Atlantic, although it has always been my impression that British vulgarity is far more colorful and evocative than the somewhat sad, pitiful hackneyed version in the U.S.

In any case, there is ongoing debate about whether dictionaries should reflect common usage or define normative usage; whichever it is, most dictionary entries on ‘scumbag’ these days have the disparaging but not the vulgar connotation (good thing, because otherwise would we find the word in the dictionary at all?). And so it goes with most vulgarity? It feels as if something is lost when saying ‘fuck’ does not bring on a little shiver blending daring, delight and alarm.

On the other hand, I have wondered if this is not a benefit of the sexual revolution, in a sense. If sex is less shameful, do sexual connotations (and references to other bodily functions) become less disparaging? Since people need expletives, in a sense, could it be that the pejorative connotations of f-words, c-words etc. are more highly conserved than the sexualized flavor? In being wistful about the thrill of uttering a forbidden word, and in conveying the same attitude to my children, am I showing my stripes as a ‘prude’??

More: People interested in this issue would do well to browse through the contents of Maledicta, ‘the international journal of verbal aggression’, available here.

Readers of FmH know that, as a psychiatrist, I am deeply concerned about the travesty we have made of diagnosis, largely driven by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). There are many reasons it is flawed, but one of the most important is how far away the basis of classification it shapes is from person-centered knowledge. Now the disenfranchised wing of the profession of psychiatry, the psychoanalytically-driven proponents of the talking cure, fire back, with The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM), a personality-based system of diagnosis and classification. Given their relative lack of power in Western psychiatry in the 21st century, I doubt it will go far, but it is a welcome effort, and I have placed my pre-order.

A number of webloggers have already linked to this sensible primer by Leslie Harpold. I imagine it is because we recognize our having lost this gracious art ourselves and feeling moved to reclaim it?

Seymour Hersh, one of our most important intelligence assets, writes in the New Yorker on Bush administration plans for the coming war with Iran. A series of quiet meetings have begun and the Iraq situation is being replicated in that only the converted are being preached to and Bush comes out of it taking the lack of dissent as encouragement. Ahmadinejad is routinely demonized as a ‘Hitler’ by this administration which does not know the meaning of the word diplomacy. Prejudice, hysteria, xenophobia and bellicosity have taken the place of any coherent threat assessment about how soon Iran could attain nuclear weapons capacity and what kind of danger that would represent. Just as in the buildup to the Iraq invasion, analysis of intelligence is being bypassed and raw data cherrypicked to fit preconceived agendas. For example, much is being made of supposed Teherani contacts of A.Q.Khan, the proliferation-mongering so-called ‘father of the Pakistani atomic bomb’ now under house arrest in Islamabad. It is unlikely the U.S. will allow the I.A.E.A., U.N. regulatory processes, and European diplomatic efforts to move forward any more than we did before moving on Iraq.

Covert teams of US forces are on the ground in Iran, Hersh reports, and the Air Force is drawing up target lists for a massive air campaign, the aim of which is regime change. The air force has begun flying simulated bombing missions which have all the earmarks of nuclear weapons delivery. Hersh argues that the dispersal and burial of Iranian nuclear facilities combined with the lack of intelligence about which surface manifestations hide strategic resources makes the use of the ‘bunker-busting’ nuclear weapons all but inevitably necessary. Since a prolonged bombing campaign based on a principle of attrition would likely provoke Muslim anger and retaliatory strikes against U.S., Israeli and other European interests around the world, a decisive strike that decapitates Iranian assets in one fell swoop becomes more likely in this messianic vision. Furthermore, we certainly do not have the resources for a prolonged ground war, making a definitive first strike the only feasible option. But there are apparently serious misgivings even among the Joint Chiefs of Staff about planning for the nuclear option. Opponents are shouted down and some are thinking of resigning, which will of course solidify the hardline stance in the administration.

Again, I can’t speak with enough urgency about the necessity for everyone to read the Hersh article and related coverage of what we are planning in Iran. Reach your own conclusions about whether this seems the urgent threat I feel it is. If you believe so, it is time to come together in a massive new movement focused on stopping the administration madmen from a course of action that will result in a nuclear strike on Iran. If we think the world as we knew it ended on Sept. 11, 2001, just wait; could the confrontation be coming as soon as this summer, to help the Republicans out in the November midterm elections? Or certainly before the fall of 2008.

Throughout my life, I have been much more or an activist (literal meaning: “one who is active“, right?) than during the mounting outrages of the Bush years, despite my growing conviction this administration’s insanity presents the greatest threat to life as we know it that I have seen in my lifetime. Somehow I justified my complacency by saying that my weblogging activities are a sufficiently potent form of activism, spreading the word (yeah, right to my all of 300 or so daily visitors??). But none of the righteous weblogging indignation of a community of writers far more articulate and passionate than I am stopped the tragic debacle of the destruction of Iraq. Part of the problem is how inured we have become to the outrages of the Bush era as they have accumulated unceasingly. But the outrages to which we are ramping up now are transcendent, and now is the time for far more. What can you, we, do to make sure the administration does not pursue this mad course of action?

“The Pentagon wants to deploy a host of exotic new weapons systems. Critics say too much of this costly hardware is designed to fight the wrong war.” (Popular Mechanics)

“(as judged by notoriety, absurdity, and number of people duped)” (The Museum of Hoaxes) The article also has a link to this page, about speculation about the origins of April Fool’s Day. An interesting theory connects it to the calendar reform in 16th century Europe. Those who declined to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and thus continued to celebrate the new year at the end of March instead of the newly decreed day of January 1st, were supposedly subject to ridicule and practical jokes at that time.

The surfacing of the ‘Gospel of Judas’ may or may not rock Christianity:

Critics dismiss the new document as a Gnostic text written so long after the fact that it can have no claim to accuracy. This will only ring true for those who try to sort Biblical text into the manmade and the revelatory, excluding the former and attempting to base their faith on the promise of the latter. I have always found that a tragic flaw in true believers. A central fact about Christianity is the lack of contemporaneous documentation; everything known about Jesus is retrospective, and all historical texts have a viewpoint and an agenda. It also seems to me that this has some relationship to the core tension between the concepts of Jesus as a man and as God made flesh.

The notion of the ‘good Judas’ is not at all unfamiliar. I first encountered it for example in Kazantzakis’ stunning Last Temptation of Christ (the novel, not necessarily the film…), which may be why in my mind the notion of Jesus asking Judas to take on the role of the betrayer is indelibly wedded to the notion of Christ’s humanity. I think it is likely that this concept, indeed this document, is not so much being freshly discovered as it is emerging from centuries of suppression by the orthodoxy. And what agendas underlie its reemergence? The National Geographic Society is rumored to have paid $1 million for the publication rights…

[And, no, I have no idea how this ties in with Dan Brown’s ideas, which I have not read…]

A number of webloggers have already linked to this sensible primer by Leslie Harpold. I imagine it is because we recognize our having lost this gracious art ourselves and feeling moved to reclaim it?

Wouldn’t the sentence “I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and and and and and Chips in my ‘Fish and Chips’ sign” have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

If you didn’t already have enough reasons to avoid soft drinks (Yahoo! News)

In addition to my longstanding RSS feed, I have just set up a prettier FeedBurner feed here.

…Preventing Human-to-Human Transmission (Scientific American)

Mind Hacks comments on a strange Guardian story of a man who is still ‘a wreck’ seven years after he stopped his nine-year binge on MDMA (XTC; Ecstasy).

It reveals some of the methodological problems in establishing how harmful MDMA is, since (a) we may not be entitled to extrapolate from extreme use to more moderate recreational use; (b) one has to rule out that observed effects are from the MDMA rather than any concurrent use of other substances. But the most telling point is their last one — “what kind of man would take 40,000 ecstasy pills?”

And so, again, we face the age-old psychiatric equivalent of the chicken and the egg question. Does drug use per se cause the psychopathology (on any of a number of measures) found in substance abusers; or does the psychopathology come first? Durng my residency, I remember one year during which I was supervised by two senior luminaries of psychiatry whose offices were at opposite ends of the corridor I inhabited. The late Norm Zinberg claimed that the psychological alterations were results of the ‘drug, set and setting’ of the drug user; and Ed Khantzian claimed that much of drug abuse was ‘self-medication’, knowingly or unknowingly, of an underlying mental disorder, and thus that the drug abuse could be stabilized or prevented by treatment of the underlying condition. A corollary of this was the ‘drug of choice’ hypothesis, which said that one gravitated to a particular preferred drug in accordance with the nature of one’s underlying diagnosis. Being literally (and memorably) caught in the middle, I sometimes think that my real psychiatric training that year consisted in learning how to be diplomatic, synthetic and integrative in the face of these insistent, and mutually incompatible, didactic stances…. [Here, by the way, Khantzian writes a brief remembrance of Zinberg…]

Related: The Trip of a Lifetime: a new generation researches the medical benefits of the deprecated hallucinogenic drug LSD. (BBC)

Benetton’s magazine Colors has a special issue on the treatment of mental illness around the world. Ignore their pompous commentary and focus on the striking photographs.

Camera connected directly into optic nerves; “I just call myself the robo-chick…”

Firefox Past 10 Percent Share (BetaNews)

Within three years, 95% of the state’s uninsured will have health coverage under the provisions of the bill! Of course, the biggest political compromise required to get the bill through was the obvious one — it bypasses a single-payor system and perpetuates the historical accident by which health coverage in the US has been largely an employee benefit. The bill establishes a per-employee penalty for any employer that does not provide health insurance for its employees, which as I understand it will subsidize the state free-care pool. Political maneuvering has whittled the size of the penalty down from a proposed $800 to only $295 a year, and Romney (who has line-item veto power on budget measures) says he will excise that provision all together, although that is a line item veto that the legislature will override.