Viraj's Weblog

Here is a really good episode of This American Life. John Hodgeman's act was interesting. He first asks people their preference of invisibility or ability to fly, then asks what they would do with those powers. It turns out no one really wants to fight crime. Invisible people pretty much would like to spy on people, find out what they really think about them, and other trite nonsense. Flying people would be more ambitious. One said he'd want groupies, because people would love to sleep with someone that can fly. Another would become "Fly to Paris Man".

I heard this On Science podcast and there was an good segment on autism. The written article is here. It tries to describe how autistic people see the world. Temple Grandin was also good movie that attempts to show visually what it must be like to be autistic.

Awhile ago I read a book about the history of psychosurgery. The timing was good because Shutter Island came out shortly afterwards, and one thing I liked about that movie is how true it was to the so-called science of the time. It's sometimes amazing to see how well-educated doctors looked at "diseases" and "cures." I'm sure 50 years from now, people will look upon medical science of today with equivalent horror. It's all relative.

To give an idea, the book describes one look at homosexuality:

The whole presentation reminds me of a time when they used to treat homosexuality by prostatic massage. I recall such a patient who had been treated ... for two years, but he was still homosexual ... As the physician in question was a man of the highest type, I was sure he must attribute some virtue to such treatment, so I asked him how he expected to cure homosexuality by prostatic massage. He thought the massage might rub out the homosexual cells and that they would be replaced by heterosexual cells ...

The book is generally about Walter Freeman, who was widely known for performing lobotomies with an ice pick. Note this person was not even a doctor. He used to do outpatient calls and perform lobotomies in the comfort of your own home. That's how mainstream this became.

Esteemed journals like JAMA talked about lobotomies of course:

An emotional attitude of violent unreasoning opposition to this form of treatment [lobotomy] would be inexcusable. True it is a mutilating operation and it does result in certain defects in personality and behavior. However, much surgery is mutilating in the sense that some ordinary normal tissue is removed in order to achieve a beneficial result ...

Yes, similar to how building muscles involve first causing damage to the muscle to induce a strengthening recuperation right? Actually you can see some of my thoughts on that matter. But really, how did it make crazy people better? Here is an interesting experiment:

There is an obvious change in personality. The monkey loses its preoperative shyness and is less fearful of man. It appears more inquisitive than the normal monkey of the same age. In a large cage with other monkeys of the same size, such an animal shows no grooming behavior or acts of affection towards its companions. In fact, it treats them as it treats inanimate objects and will walk on them, bump into them if they happen to be in the way, and will even sit on them. It will openly eat food in the hand of a companion without being prepared to do battle and appears surprised when it is rebuffed. Such an animal never shows actual hostility to its fellows. It neither fights nor tries to escape when removed from a cage. It acts under all circumstances as though it had lost its "social conscience." ... It is thus evident that following removal of the anterior limbic area, such monkeys lose some of the social fear and anxiety which normally governs their activity and thus lose the ability to accurately forecast the social repercussions of their own actions.

Interestingly, the Catholic church took a cautious approach. As long as the doctors made sure to leave an important part in the brain:

A retreat was held to consider some of the questions raised by lobotomy for the Church and for Catholics in general. It was decided that a person should not be accepted into the priesthood after a lobotomy, and that a lobotomized priest should not hear confessions or administer the sacraments as "here the safer course must be followed." ... Much weight was given ... to an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XII, which implied that an operation that made a Catholic an "automaton" by removing "free will" would be unlawful, but did not object to lobotomy if "free will" was retained, even if there was some diminution of personality. If the soul could survive death, it could probably survive a lobotomy, one member of the Catholic hierarchy observed.

Yes, please leave the "free will" section intact. Lobotomies played a part in politics too, as mentioned by a California neurosurgeon:

The person convicted of a violent crime should have the chance for a corrective operation ... Each violent young criminal incarcerated from 20 years to life costs taxpayers perhaps $100,000. For roughly $6000, society can provide medical treatment which will transform him into a responsible well-adjusted citizen.

If you call within the next 20 minutes, you will receive a second one for free! Lobotomies are of course cheaper than mental institutions. Ever wonder where all the institutions went? There used to be a lot more. Now people who would be considered patients in the past roam society. That's because we have newer "cures".

What I found really interesting in the book is the conversion of lobotomies to today's pharmacological solutions. Actually there was a big debate between the surgical vs the pharmacological. The first was the advent of chlorpromazine. If you will recall, this was mentioned in the movie Shutter Island. This drug, like many, was found by accident:

Chlorpromazine [Thorazine] was inadvertently discovered following experimentation with antimalarial compounds and drugs to prevent surgical shock, and antidepressant drugs were discovered by their unexpected mood-elevating effects on tubercular patients.

Freeman embraced the coming drug horizon. That's because he considered it equivalent to lobotomy:

Freeman acknowledged that lobotomy was being eclipsed by the new drugs, whose effect he called "chemical lobotomy," and said that this was a "good thing as far as it concerns chronic hospital patients."

Drugs are definitely less scary than ice picks. The rest is history. The number of antipsychotic drugs out there is staggering. In some way they seek to alter the mind. Was Freeman right in equating them chemical lobotomies?

I guess this is a new internet meme.

Just finished the excellent book How Pleasure Works. Here are some interesting quotes.

What kind of pictures would you expect monkeys to like looking at? One is very obvious, the other is not:

In a recent study, male rhesus monkeys were put into an experimental setup where they could choose, by moving their heads, to either receive some sweet fruit juice or to get to look at a picture. There were two sorts of pictures that monkeys would give up the juice for - female hindquarters and the faces of high-status male monkeys. Two major vices - pornography and celebrity worship - are not exclusively human.

Another interesting topic is how we tend to treat pictures as the real thing.

My colleagues and I recently did a series of studies in which we took pictures of people's precious objects - their wedding rings, say - and asked them to cut the pictures up. They were willing to do so, but measures of skin conductance showed that they were in a state of mild anxiety, as if they were destroying the precious things themselves. And if you ask people to throw darts at pictures of babies, they tend to miss.

Then there is the idea of why we like to watch horror films, or gawk at anything where someone is in a bad predicament. It's the same reason why we play-fight:

We are drawn, then, toward worst-case scenarios. The details of the scenarios are often irrelevant. It's not that we enjoy zombie films because we need to prepare for the zombie uprising. We don't have to plan for what to do if we accidentally kill our fathers, or marry our mothers. But even these exotic cases serve as useful practice for bad times, exercising our psyches for when life goes to hell. From this perspective, it's not the zombies that make zombie films so compelling, it is that the theme of the zombies is a clever way to frame stories about being attacked by strangers and betrayed by those we love. This is what attracts us; the brain eating is an optional extra.

And what about chili peppers or other foods no other animal would eat?

.. it is hard to see why we would need to practice eating spicy foods or taking hot baths. These Rozin cases might have a more utilitarian explanation, something along the line of the awful old joke about the guy who was banging his head against the wall; when asked why he was doing it, he said, "It feels so good when I stop." For some of Rozin's examples, the initial pain might be worthwhile because it is outweighed by the later pleasure. We might grow to like the pain of stepping into a hot bath, because it is always followed by the bliss of when the temperature becomes just right.

This girl has some incredible metal guitar playing videos on youtube. I should just give up!

Here is a rock track I just finished. Enjoy!