Saturday, July 12, 2014

Emergence and Persistence of Communities in Coevolutionary Networks

Here is some serious geekery for your Saturday entertainment. This is a fairly complex and computational model of how social communities emerge and survive over time through a process called "adaptive rewiring."

Here is a brief overview of how these coevolutionary networks might exist in different realms:
In a social network, communities might indicate factions, interest groups, or social divisions [1]; in biological networks, they encompass entities having the same biological function [5–7]; in the WorldWideWeb they may correspond to groups of pages dealing with the same or related topics [8]; in food webs they may identify compartments [9]; and a community in a metabolic or genetic network might be related to a specific functional task [10].
And for those of us who are not familiar with this field or its terminology, here is a glossary of network terminology, taken from Gross and Blasius (2008).
A brief network glossary.

Degree. The degree of a node is the number of nearest neighbours to which a node is connected. The mean degree of the network is the mean of the individual degrees of all nodes in the network.
Dynamics. Depending on the context, the term dynamics is used in the literature to refer to a temporal change of either the state or the topology of a network. In this paper, we use the term dynamics exclusively to describe a change in the state, while the term evolution is used to describe a change in the topology.
Evolution. Depending on the context the term evolution is used in the literature to refer to a temporal change of either the state or the topology of a network. In this paper, we use the term evolution exclusively to describe a change in the topology, while the term dynamics is used to describe a change in the state.
Frozen nodes. A node is said to be frozen if its state does not change over in the long-term behaviour of the network. In certain systems discussed here, the state of frozen nodes can change nevertheless on an even longer (topological) time scale.
Link. A link is a connection between two nodes in the networks. Links are also sometimes called edges or simply network connections.
Neighbours. Two nodes are said to be neighbours if they are connected by a link.
Node. The node is the principal unit of the network. A network consists of a number of nodes connected by links. Nodes are sometimes also called vertices.
Scale-free network. In scale-free networks, the distribution of node degrees follows a power law.
State of the network. Depending on the context, the state of a network is used either to describe the state of the network nodes or the state of the whole network including the nodes and the topology. In this review, we use the term state to refer exclusively to the collective state of the nodes. Thus, the state is a priori independent of the network topology.
Topology of the network. The topology of a network defines a specific pattern of connections between the network nodes.
And from the same authors (citation at the bottom of the post), here is a visual representation of how adaptive rewiring might look:

This is interesting stuff and it seems very relevant to emerging coevolutionary networks in P2P communities and other cooperative networks that emerging in the post-capitalist world.

Full Citation:
González-Avella, JC, Cosenza, MG, Herrera, JL, & Tucci, K. (2014, Jul 1). Emergence and persistence of communities in coevolutionary networks. arXiv:1407.0388v1

Emergence and persistence of communities in coevolutionary networks

J. C. González-Avella, M. G. Cosenza, J. L. Herrera, K. Tucci
We investigate the emergence and persistence of communities through a recently proposed mechanism of adaptive rewiring in coevolutionary networks. We characterize the topological structures arising in a coevolutionary network subject to an adaptive rewiring process and a node dynamics given by a simple voterlike rule. We find that, for some values of the parameters describing the adaptive rewiring process, a community structure emerges on a connected network. We show that the emergence of communities is associated to a decrease in the number of active links in the system, i.e. links that connect two nodes in different states. The lifetime of the community structure state scales exponentially with the size of the system. Additionally, we find that a small noise in the node dynamics can sustain a diversity of states and a community structure in time in a finite size system. Thus, large system size and/or local noise can explain the persistence of communities and diversity in many real systems.


Many social, biological, and technological systems possess a characteristic network structure consisting of communities or modules, which are groups of nodes distinguished by having a high density of links between nodes of the same group and a comparatively low density of links between nodes of different groups [1–4]. Such a network structure is expected to play an important functional role in many systems. In a social network, communities might indicate factions, interest groups, or social divisions [1]; in biological networks, they encompass entities having the same biological function [5–7]; in the WorldWideWeb they may correspond to groups of pages dealing with the same or related topics [8]; in food webs they may identify compartments [9]; and a community in a metabolic or genetic network might be related to a specific functional task [10].

Since community structure constitutes a fundamental feature of many networks, the development of methods and techniques for the detection of communities represents one of the most active research areas in network science [2, 11–17]. In comparison, much less work has been done to address a fundamental question: how do communities arise in networks? [18].

Clearly, the emergence of characteristic topological structures, including communities, from a random or featureless network requires some dynamical process that modifies the properties of the links representing the interactions between nodes. We refer to such link dynamics as a rewiring process. Links can vary their strength, or they can appear and disappear as a consequence of a rewiring process. In our view, two classes of rewiring processes leading to the formation of structures in networks can be distinguished: (i) rewirings based on local connectivity properties regardless of the values of the state variables of the nodes, which we denote as topological rewirings; and (ii) rewirings that depend on the state variables of the nodes, where the link dynamics is coupled to the node state dynamics and which we call adaptive rewirings.

Topological rewiring processes have been employed to explain the origin of small-world and scale-free networks [19, 20]. These rewirings can lead to the appearance of community structures in networks with weighted links [21] or by preferential attachment driven by local clustering [22]. On the other hand, there is currently much interest in the study of networks that exhibit a coupling between topology and states, since many systems observed in nature can be described as dynamical networks of interacting nodes where the connections and the states of the nodes affect each other and evolve simultaneously [23–29]. These systems have been denoted as coevolutionary dynamical systems or adaptive networks and, according to our classification above, they are subject to adaptive rewiring processes. The collective behavior of coevolutionary systems is determined by the competition of the time scales of the node dynamics and the rewiring process. Most works that employ coevolutionary dynamics have focused on the characterization of the phenomenon of network fragmentation arising from this competition. Although community structures have been found in some coevolutionary systems [30–33], investigating the mechanisms for the formation of perdurable communities remains an open problem.

In this paper we investigate the emergence and the persistence of communities in networks induced by a process of adaptive rewiring. Our work is based on a recently proposed general framework for coevolutionary dynamics in networks [29]. We characterize the topological structures forming in a coevolutionary network having a simple node dynamics. We unveil a region of parameters where the formation of a supertransient modular structure on the network occurs. We study the stability of the community configuration under small perturbations of the node dynamics, as well as for different initial conditions of the system.

Gross, T, and Blasius, B. (2008, Mar). Adaptive coevolutionary networks: A review. Journal of the Royal Society Interface; 5(20): 259-271. doi: 10.1098/​rsif.2007.1229

Friday, July 11, 2014

Kelly Clancy - Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos

From Nautilus, Kelly Clancy takes a look at the increasing evidence for chaos in the brain and nervous system. The nervous system is literally overwhelmed by incoming sensory data, so much so that much of it never makes it into consciousness.

On the other hand, the brain stem and its adjacent structures, a collection of filters in one sense (which Antonio Damasio calls the protoself), function as gatekeepers to decide what gets passed up into the limbic system and cerebral cortex (i.e., what becomes conscious).

The proposal that there is some chaos in this system is perfectly reasonable - a lot of biological systems contain chaos, which is not the same as disorder. That is an important point that is made in this article:
Even with these qualifications, chaos in the nervous system makes a lot of neuroscientists, specifically the computationalists, very nervous because it would completely derail their model.

Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos

Neurological evidence for chaos in the nervous system is growing.

By Kelly Clancy Illustration by Josh Cochran July 10, 2014




At the same time, chaos has its advantages. On a behavioral level, the arms race between predator and prey has wired erratic strategies into our nervous system.[1] A moth sensing an echo-locating bat, for example, immediately directs itself away from the ultrasound source. The neurons controlling its flight fire in an increasingly erratic manner as the bat draws closer, until the moth, darting in fits, appears to be nothing but a tumble of wings and legs. More generally, chaos could grant our brains a great deal of computational power, by exploring many possibilities at great speed.



The similarity to random disorder (or stochasticity) has been a thorn in the side of formal studies of chaos. It can be mathematically tricky to distinguish between the two—especially in biological systems. There are no definite tests for chaos when dealing with multi-dimensional, fluctuating biological data. Walter Freeman and his colleagues spearheaded some of the earliest studies attempting to prove the existence of chaos in the brain, but came to extreme conclusions on limited data. He’s argued, for example, that neuropil, the extracellular mix of axons and dendrites, is the organ of consciousness—a strong assertion in any light. Philosophers soon latched onto these ideas, taking even the earliest studies at face value. Articles by philosophers and scientists alike can be as apt to quote Jiddu Krishnamurti as Henri Poincaré, and chaos is often handled with a semi-mystical reverence.[2, 3]

As a result, researchers must tread carefully to be taken seriously. But the search for chaos is not purely poetic. The strongest current evidence comes from single cells. The squid giant axon, for example, operates in a resting mode or a repetitive firing mode, depending on the external sodium concentration. Between these extremes, it exhibits unpredictable bursting that resembles the wandering behavior of a chaotic trajectory before it settles into an attractor. When a periodic input is applied, the squid giant axon responds with a mixture of both oscillating and chaotic activity.[4] There is chaos in networks of cells, too. The neurons in a patch of rat skin can distinguish between chaotic and disordered patterns of skin stretching.[5]

More evidence for chaos in the nervous system can be found at the level of global brain activity. Bizarrely, an apt metaphor for this behavior is an iron slab.[6] The electrons it contains can each point in different directions (more precisely, their spins can point). Like tiny magnets, neighboring spins influence each other. When the slab is cold, there is not enough energy to overcome the influence of neighboring spins, and all spins align in the same direction, forming one solid magnet. When the slab is hot, each spin has so much energy that it can shrug off the influence of its neighbor, and the slab’s spins are disordered. When the slab is halfway between hot and cold, it is in the so-called “critical regime.” This is characterized by fluctuating domains of same-spin regions which exhibit the highest possible dynamic correlations—that is, the best balance between a spin’s ability to influence its neighbors, and its ability to be changed.

The critical state can be quite useful for the brain, allowing it to exploit both order and disorder in its computations—employing a redundant network with rich, rapid chaotic dynamics, and an orderly readout function to stably map the network state to outputs. The critical state would be maintained not by temperature, but the balance of neural excitation and inhibition. If the balance is tipped in favor of more inhibition, the brain is “frozen” and nothing happens. If there is too much excitation, it will descend into chaos. The critical point is analogous to an attractor.

But how can we tell whether the brain operates at the critical point? One clue is the structure of the signals generated by the activity of its billions of neurons. We can measure the power of the brain’s electrical activity at different oscillation frequencies. It turns out that the power of activity falls off as the inverse of the frequency of that activity. Once referred to as 1/f “noise,” this relationship is actually a hallmark of systems balanced at their critical point.[7] The spatial extent of regions of coordinated neuronal activity also depend inversely on frequency, another hallmark of criticality. When the brain is pushed away from its usual operating regime using pharmacological agents, it usually loses both these hallmarks,[8, 9] and the efficiency of its information encoding and transmission is reduced.[10]

THE PHILOSOPHER Gilles Deleuze and psychiatrist Felix Guattari contended that the brain’s main function is to protect us, like an umbrella, from chaos. It seems to have done so by exploiting chaos itself. At the same time, neural networks are also capable of near-perfect reliability, as with the beating heart. Order and disorder enjoy a symbiotic relationship, and a neuron’s firing may wander chaotically until a memory or perception propels it into an attractor. Sensory input would then serve to “stabilize” chaos. Indeed, the presentation of a stimulus reduces variability in neuronal firing across a surprising number of different species and systems,[11] as if a high-dimensional chaotic trajectory fell into an attractor. By “taming” chaos, attractors may represent a strategy for maintaining reliability in a sensitive system.[12] Recent theoretical and experimental studies of large networks of independent oscillators have also shown that order and chaos can co-exist in surprising harmony, in so-called chimera states.[13]

The current research paradigm in neuroscience, which considers neurons in a snapshot of time as stationary computational units, and not as members of a shifting dynamical entity, might be missing the mark entirely. If chaos plays an important role in the brain, then neural computations do not operate as a static read-out, a lockstep march from the transduction of photons to the experience of light, but a high-dimensional dynamic trajectory as spikes dance across the brain in self-choreographed cadence.

While hundreds of millions of dollars are being funneled into building the connectome—a neuron-by-neuron map of the brain—scientists like Eve Marder have argued that, due to the complexity of these circuits, a structural map alone will not get us very far. Functional connections can flicker in and out of existence in milliseconds. Individual neurons appear to change their tuning properties over time [14, 15] and thus may not be “byte-addressable”—that is, stably represent some piece of information—but instead operate within a dynamic dictionary that constantly shifts to make room for new meaning. Chaos encourages us to think of certain disorders as dynamical diseases, epileptic seizures being the most dramatic example of the potential failure of chaos.[16] Chaos might also serve as a signature of brain health: For example, researchers reported less chaotic dynamics in the dopamine-producing cells of rodents with brain lesions, as opposed to healthy rodents, which could have implications in diagnosing and treating Parkinson’s and other dopamine-related disorders.[17]

Economist Murray Rothbard described chaos theory as “destroying math from within.” It usurps the human impulse to simplify, replacing the clear linear relationships we seek in nature with the messy and unpredictable. Similarly, chaos in the brain undermines glib caricatures of human behavior. Economists often model humans as “rational agents”: hedonistic calculators who act for their future good. But we can’t really act out of self-interest—though that would be a reasonable thing to do—because we are terrible at predicting what that is. After all, how could we? It’s precisely this failure that makes us what we are.

Kelly Clancy studied physics at MIT, then worked as an itinerant astronomer for several years before serving with the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. As a National Science Foundation fellow, she recently finished her PhD in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. She will begin her postdoctoral research at Biozentrum in Switzerland this fall.


1. Humphries, D.A. & Driver, P.M. Protean defence by prey animals. Oecologia 5, 285–302 (1970).
2. Abraham, F.D. Chaos, bifurcations, and self-organization: dynamical extensions of neurological positivism. Psychoscience 1, 85-118 (1992).
3. O’Nuallain, S. Zero power and selflessness: what meditation and conscious perception have in common. Cognitive Science 4, 49-64 (2008).
4. Korn, H. & Faure, P. Is there chaos in the brain? II. Experimental evidence and related models. Comptes Rendus Biologies 326, 787–840 (2003).
5. Richardson, K.A., Imhoff, T.T., Grigg, P. & Collins, J.J. Encoding chaos in neural spike trains. Physical Review Letters 80, 2485–2488 (1998).
6. Beggs, J.M. & Timme, N. Being critical of criticality in the brain. Frontiers in Physiology 3, 1–14 (2012).
7. Bak, P., Tang, C. & Wiesenfeld, K. Self-organized criticality: an explanation of 1/f noise. Physical Review Letters 59, 381–384 (1987).
8. Mazzoni, A. et al. On the dynamics of the spontaneous activity in neuronal networks. PLoS ONE 2 e439 (2007).
9. Beggs, J.M. & Plenz, D. Neuronal avalanches in neocortical circuits. Journal of Neuroscience 23, 11167–11177 (2003).
10. Shew, W.L., Yang, H., Yu, S., Roy, R. & Plenz, D. Information capacity and transmission are maximized in balanced cortical networks with neuronal avalanches. Journal of Neuroscience 31, 55–63 (2011).
11. Churchland, M.M. et al. Stimulus onset quenches neural variability: a widespread cortical phenomenon. Nature Neuroscience 13, 369–378 (2010).
12. Laje, R. & Buonomano, D.V. Robust timing and motor patterns by taming chaos in recurrent neural networks. Nature Neuroscience 16, 925–933 (2013).
13. Kuramoto, Y. & Battogtokh, D. Coexistence of coherence and incoherence in nonlocally coupled phase oscillators: a soluble case. Nonlinearity 26, 2469-2498 (2002).
14. Margolis, D.J. et al. Reorganization of cortical population activity imaged throughout long-term sensory deprivation. Nature Neuroscience 15, 1539–1546 (2012).
15. Ziv, Y. et al. Long-term dynamics of CA1 hippocampal place codes. Nature Neuroscience 16, 264–266 (2013).
16. Schiff, S.J. et al. Controlling chaos in the brain. Nature 370, 615–620 (1994).
17. di Mascio, M., di Giovanni, G., di Matteo, V. & Esposito, E. Decreased chaos of midbrain dopaminergic neurons after serotonin denervation. Neuroscience 92, 237–243 (1999).

Headhunters: The Search for a Science of the Mind (Book Review)

From the Times Literary Supplement (London Times), this is a review of a new book not yet published in the U.S. called Headhunters: The Search for a Science of the Mind, by Ben Shephard. This book appears to be an interesting look at the history of modern anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, and psychotherapy in Britain.

Forgotten pioneers of the science of the mind

Published: 9 July 2014

HEADHUNTERS: The search for a science of the mind
Ben Shephard
323pp. Bodley Head. £25.
Charles Seligman; from the book under review Photograph: Bodley Head 
We hope you enjoy this free piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and on the TLS app. This week’s issue features Mary Beard on the afterlife of Pompeii, Henrietta Foster and Kathryn Sutherland on a portrait of Jane Austen, Leo A. Lensing on the self-destructive life of Ingeborg Bachmann, Anson Rabinbach on the First World War – and much more. 

In the early twentieth century, a handful of Cambridge men, young medical doctors mostly, established modern anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and psychotherapy in Britain. Ben Shephard sums up their quest as “a search for a science of the mind”, which was certainly a large part of it, but they were interested in a great many other things as well. They were close associates who influenced one another, but it would be a mistake to exaggerate the coherence of their projects or the extent to which they shared a common sense of what they were after. Because they were so eclectic and ranged so widely, they were not installed as ancestor figures in the disciplines into which the human sciences were beginning to fragment, even if they were influential in the committees that helped to shape the new professional institutions. Their names are therefore mostly unfamiliar today. Shephard rescues them from the oubliette of disciplinary histories and presents them as members of a cohort: a network of eccentric, wilful, brilliant men who were prepared to go anywhere, try anything, to advance the scientific understanding of human nature. 

Central members of this cohort were brought together in the 1898 “Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits”, that narrow stretch of sea, with numerous islands, which separates Australia and New Guinea. The expedition was organized by a zoologist, Alfred Haddon. Encouraged by Thomas Huxley, Haddon had visited the Torres Strait a year earlier to study tropical fauna and coral reefs. He became interested in the islanders and was tempted to take up anthropology, although Huxley did warn him that nobody could make a living at it. (Mrs Haddon pluckily remarked that “you may as well starve as an anthropologist as a zoologist”.) Haddon then put together a scientific expedition to the Strait. The islanders seemed particularly interesting since they might constitute a link between the peoples of New Guinea and Indonesia and the Australian Aborigines, who represented for the Victorians the archetypal savage hunter-gatherers. And their origins were mysterious. The Cambridge team would study the anatomy, physiology, sense perception and sociology of the natives. 

Haddon lectured on comparative anatomy in the Natural Sciences department in Cambridge alongside a young doctor, W. H. R. Rivers, who lectured on the sense organs. Rivers had studied experimental psychology at the leading school in the world, in Jena, in Germany, and developed an unfashionable interest in mental illnesses. Haddon invited him to lead the psychological side of the expedition, but Rivers hesitated until his two favourite students, William McDougall and C. S. Myers, signed on. He then told Haddon that after the recent death of his mother he felt run down and in need of a holiday. He would come along and pay his own way. Charles Seligman, a pathologist who was a friend and contemporary of Myers, also volunteered and was directed to join Rivers, Myers and McDougall in doing experiments on the sight and hearing of the islanders. 

“I put the direction of the psychological department entirely into the hands of Rivers”, Haddon reported, “and for the first time psychological observations were made on a backward people in their own country by trained psychologists with adequate equipment.” Despite Haddon’s optimism, their equipment turned out to be far from adequate in tropical conditions and they ended up doing quite simple experiments, but the results appeared to show that the sense perception of the islanders was not very different from that of Europeans. They might be better able to discriminate birds at a distance, but only because they had been trained to do so. Their colour vocabulary was undeveloped, but they could pick out the same shades of difference as an average Englishman. Personalities, too, were familiar. “The character of the natives appears to be as diverse as it would be in any English town”, Myers remarked. Their cook was “the sturdy, plodding thick-set workman”. Another man was “the best example of the high-strung nervous type: his excitement when he is telling a story is remarkable”. And then there was Ulai, “the personification of cunning”, who grasped what the expedition was after and sold Rivers a collection of rods that recorded his sexual conquests, explaining that at his age he would not be adding to their number. 

Haddon directed the ethnological research. One coup was to persuade the Murray islanders to revive a male initiation ceremony that the missionaries had banned. Rivers found himself drawn to sociological issues, especially family and kinship. “While going over the various names which one man would apply to others, I was occasionally told that such and such a man would stop a fight, another would bury a dead man, and so on”, he noted. “When the clues given by these occasional remarks were followed up it was found that there were certain very definite duties and privileges attached to certain bonds of kinship.” Rivers went on to become the leading kinship theorist of his generation. 

Studying hearing, Myers and Seligman collected recordings of local music. Then Seligman went off to do some ethnological work of his own in New Guinea, and Myers and McDougall made a difficult journey to Sarawak, where the administrator, Charles Hose, was orchestrating a peace conference between two groups of headhunters. Myers found it all rather trying, and objected particularly to having to do his daily rounds surrounded by pigs. “How much this distracts from the pleasures of defecation and subsequent pig eating”, he complained. Nor could he get on with the local people. His one achievement was the collection of music recordings. McDougall fitted in rather better with the swashbuckling Hose and enjoyed the company of the headhunters. He was tempted to make a career of anthropology. However, he decided that it was too easy and instead went to Germany to master the latest experimental methods in psychology. 

Another Cambridge friend of Rivers was a young Australian doctor, Grafton Elliot Smith, who had been studying the brains of marsupials. When the Haddon team set out for the Torres Strait, Elliot Smith went to Cairo as professor of anatomy at the medical school. Rivers turned up in Egypt in 1900, to investigate the colour vision of the Egyptians in order to establish a comparison with the Torres Strait islanders. His experimental subjects were labourers working for another former member of the Torres Strait team, Anthony Wilken, who was doing archaeological research. Rivers brought Elliot Smith in to examine the human remains that Wilken had uncovered, and especially the well-preserved brains of pre-dynastic people. Elliot Smith soon became a world authority on the human brain. He modelled the brain’s structure as though it was an archaeological site, the different levels supposedly reflecting evolutionary advances. The neocortex, shared by all mammals, controlled basic functions while the prefrontal area was the seat of more advanced abilities. 

Elliot Smith also began to develop theories about Egyptology and anthropology. His most famous idea was that the wonders of ancient Egypt were created not by Africans but by northern invaders, and that civilization had then spread from Egypt to all the corners of the world. Rivers was impressed, and he now decided that Melanesia had been transformed by an invasion of more advanced peoples. Seligman, who had gone on to do ethnological fieldwork in the Sudan, also adopted Elliot Smith’s thesis and argued that the most advanced African civilizations were the work of light-skinned “Hamitic” invaders who had passed through Egypt. The great African pro-consul, Lord Lugard, was a convert to this doctine, which had an obvious appeal to colonialists.
Rivers, more and more absorbed by ethnology and, engaged in writing his great work, The History of Melanesian Society, found the time to collaborate in a famous experiment with his friend Henry Head, another young doctor who had studied experimental psychology in Germany and Czechoslovakia. Investigating the perception of pain, Head had two cutaneous nerves on his left forearm severed. Every Friday for the next four years, he visited Rivers in his college rooms to chart the process of regeneration and the areas of acute sensitivity. Echoing Elliot Smith’s ideas about the evolutionary levels of the brain, Rivers and Head decided that the nervous system contained two layers: one older and more primitive; the other more subtle and localized. They speculated that the two systems “owed their origin to the developmental history of the nervous system. They reveal the means by which an imperfect organism has struggled towards improved functions and physical unity”. And this “could be seen as a metaphor for the triumph of civilization over savagery in human history”. Frederic Bartlett, a student of Rivers who went on to become a leading psychologist in the next generation, noted that this metaphor informed all Rivers’s later theories in physiology, psychology and anthropology. The structure of every human organ, every social institution, revealed cumulative layers of progressive development. 

Myers and McDougall stuck with psychology but developed very different approaches. Myers became an anti-racist and a humanist. McDougall was a biological determinist, although he did become president of the English Society for Psychical Research. 

Like Rivers, Myers initially took an evolutionary view: “The primitive mind first or the child mind, if you like; then the industrial mind; and the abnormal last of all: that seems to me the natural order, since each in a sense implies the last”. He moved from St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London to Cambridge to work with Rivers, and set up a small laboratory in a cottage in Mill Lane, funded by a gift from his mother. Here he worked on the psychological basis of rhythm in music. 

Psychology was looked down on by the Cambridge establishment, but Ludwig Wittgenstein was intrigued and regularly came to Mill Lane to work with Myers. “I had a discussion with Myers about the relations between Logic and Philosophy”, he wrote to Bertrand Russell. “I was very candid and I am sure he thinks that I am the most arrogant devil who ever lived . . . . I think he was a bit less confused after the discussion than before.” When the laboratory was opened to the public in 1913, Wittgenstein exhibited an apparatus for investigating the perception of rhythm. Perhaps influenced by Wittgenstein, Myers was moving away from biological determinism. The physiologists, he complained, “in their attempts to penetrate the reality of the known, were deliberately ignoring the knower”. Experimental psychology made unrealistic assumptions, he came to believe. “The factor of feeling was expressly eliminated from our experiments on memory.” Together with Rivers, Myers lobbied, unsuccessfully, for Cambridge to establish a mental health centre. He also criticized racial theories. The “mental characters” of a European peasant were “essentially the same as those of primitive communities”, he insisted. “In temperament we meet the same variations in primitive as in civilized communities.” 

McDougall, in contrast, remained committed to biological explanations of human behaviour. He moved to Oxford, championed eugenics, and began to theorize about race and instinct. A quirky and difficult man, who had quarrelled with most of his associates, McDougall made a satisfactory marriage with the daughter of a chimney sweep in 1900 and began to repair his strained relationships with Rivers and Myers. In 1901, the three men were instrumental in the establishment of the British Psychological Society. And they shared a commitment to develop the treatment of mental illnesses. Psychoanalytic theories came to their attention with the publication of lectures Freud had delivered in 1910 at Clark University in Massachusetts. In 1913, Jung attended a medical congress in London and impressed McDougall. He arranged to visit Jung for analysis, but was frustrated by the outbreak of the First World War. 
The war brought them all together again. The cohort of medical doctors, anthropologists and psychologists was now deployed in a new and contentious field: the treatment of soldiers traumatized by battle. (Shephard has published a study of military psychiatry, and this section of his book is particularly strong.) Myers had gone to France immediately the war broke out, and French psychiatrists had introduced him to soldiers who were suffering from strange symptoms – struck dumb, paralysed without any evident physical cause, or suffering from a total loss of memory. He concluded that these symptoms might sometimes be caused by the stress of battle, but that they might also have a physiological basis, resulting from close proximity to heavy explosions. In 1915, he published a description of “shell shock” in the British Medical Journal. In the following year he was appointed “Specialist in Nerve Shock” to the British army with the temporary rank of major. 

The diagnosis was, however, vague, and it was also problematic in operational terms. One in six shell-shock patients were officers (who constituted only one in thirty of the fighting men). And when men diagnosed with shell shock were being evacuated from the front line, even returned to Britain, there were suspicions of faking. Manpower losses from shell shock became a serious drain. In one fortnight at the height of the Battle of the Somme, 2 Division had 2,400 wounded men and 501 cases of “shell-shock wounded”. Myers was sidelined, clinics were set up near the front line to rehabilitate traumatized men, and the diagnosis of shell shock was shelved in favour of the pre-war categories of neurasthenia and hysteria. 

But large numbers of soldiers had returned to Britain, wounded or psychologically incapacitated, and suffering acutely from depression: “nervous wrecks” was the common description. McDougall found himself “the head of a hospital section full of ‘shell shock’ cases, a most strange, wonderful and pitiful collection of nervously disordered soldiers”. Elliot Smith was posted to Magull hospital near Liverpool, and recruited Rivers. They experimented with various methods, including the new talking therapy favoured by Freud and Jung, and began to pay special attention to dreams. 

Rivers moved at the end of 1916 to Craiglockhart, in Scotland, a facility for officers who had been diagnosed with shell shock. He cherry-picked the most interesting cases, one of whom, famously, was Siegfried Sassoon, who had been sent there after making an anti-war protest. Sassoon recalled that at their first session he asked Rivers if he was suffering from shell shock. 

“’Certainly not’, he replied.
‘What have I got then?’
‘Well, you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.’ We both of us laughed at that.” 

Rivers engaged critically with Freudian ideas. He reworked Freud’s dream theory in a neglected classic, Conflict and Dreams, which was published posthumously, edited by Elliot Smith. But as Sassoon apparently recognized, Rivers could well have featured as a classical Freudian case study himself, tormented by homosexual desires. In 1914, Rivers had abandoned a young student, John Layard, on a remote Melanesian island, evidently unable to cope with a physical attraction that Layard himself was willing to express. “Rivers had obviously not recognized the whole homosexual content of our relationship, probably on both sides”, Layard remarked. He also recalled that Rivers had “immense quantities of clever young men around him. He told me once that it was only the affection of young men that kept him alive”. (Layard returned to England suffering from depression. Rivers attended him but many years later he attempted suicide, was treated by Jung, and eventually published a Jungian study of dream analysis.) 

Rivers also suffered greatly from the strain of treating young officers only so that they could be sent back to the front, and he had to retire owing to nervous exhaustion. In 1922, while fighting the general election in the London University seat on behalf of the Labour Party, he had a fatal heart attack. In the same year the founding texts of the new functionalist anthropology were published, and his speculative history of Melanesian society was consigned to the scrapheap. 

More broadly, in the 1920s structural-functional accounts replaced speculative historical approaches in the natural and social sciences. The brain was now seen as an intricate working organism, its parts functionally specialized. Societies were machines for living in, not deposits of archaeological strata. Academic psychologists set out to win respect by making psychology over into an experimental natural science, abandoning therapy. 

The members of the cohort did not have the best of luck in the post-war world. Elliot Smith became a famous anatomist, but his reputation was badly damaged by his endorsement of the Piltdown forgery. (A hoaxer had put together a modern cranium and an ape’s jaw and teeth, which led Elliot Smith to conclude that early hominids had highly developed brains.) McDougall was appointed to a chair at Harvard in 1919, but his advocacy of instinct theory, eugenics and racial determinism did not go down well. Nor did his enthusiasm for psychic research. American psychology was now “behaviorist” and experimental, and McDougall was regarded as a Victorian relic, “still thinking of himself as an Englishman in the British colonies”, colleagues complained. He lost a small fortune in the stock market crash of 1929 and was then swindled over an oil well. (“The professor is noted for his experiments on animal behavior through tests made mostly with rats”, the New York Times noted with some glee. “Seems this time he got caught by two oily ones.”) Seligman became professor of ethnology at the London School of Economics, but in the 1920s he was sidelined by the charismatic Bronisław Malinowski. Myers was held responsible for the shell shock fiasco. (“There’s no such thing as shell shock”, General George S. Patton was to insist. “It’s an invention of the Jews.”) 

“Although many of the answers which Rivers, McDougall and Elliot Smith gave have proved to be wrong, because in their time the data to answer them did not exist, the questions they posed are still relevant”, Ben Shephard suggests. In fact their theories were discredited and their research programmes declared obsolete. And so they have largely been forgotten. Only Rivers has had an unexpected afterlife, resurrected in the imaginations of Siegfried Sassoon and Pat Barker. Yet this cohort of open-minded, cosmopolitan, adventurous young doctors was surely more interesting, more creative and more admirable than most of the narrow specialists who succeeded them. 

Adam Kuper is Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

What Happens to the Cool Kids When They Grow Up?

I could easily have been one of the subjects of this study. As an adolescent and teen I was desperate to be "cool," to be seen as mature, and to be "popular." It never really happened, and in some ways I was heading down the path these kids traveled - more relationship difficulties, higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse.

Fortunately for me, I bottomed out as an 18-19 year old, dropped out of the world I had been living in (including leaving behind my friends from high school), and then went back to school (after flunking out of my first college).

The kids in the study didn't make the same changes:
Hitting my bottom and becoming introspective (thank you Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, St Theresa, Mirabi, Rumi, and so many others) saved my life. AND it allowed me to do some growing up that I failed to do as a teenager (no one grows up psychologically when they are high or drunk much of the time).

What happens to the cool kids when they grow up?

Wednesday, July 2, 2014








Allen JP, Schad MM, Oudekerk B, & Chango J (2014, Jun 11). What Ever Happened to the "Cool" Kids? Long-Term Sequelae of Early Adolescent Pseudomature Behavior. Child Development; Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12250 | PMID: 24919537
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Allen JP, Schad MM, Oudekerk B, Chango J.



Research Offers New Insight into How the Brain Processes Emotions

Parametric modulation analysis (univariate) for independent ratings of positive and negative valence.

This new study sheds some light on how the brain processes emotions, although it certainly does not explain everything. According to Cornell University neuroscientist, Adam Anderson,
Interesting stuff - too bad the full article is hidden from readers behind a paywall.

Study cracks how brain processes emotions

Date: July 9, 2014
Source: Cornell University

Although feelings are personal and subjective, the human brain turns them into a standard code that objectively represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people, reports a new study. “Despite how personal our feelings feel, the evidence suggests our brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language,” one researcher concludes.

The study's findings provide insight into how the brain represents our innermost feelings – what Anderson calls the last frontier of neuroscience – and upend the long-held view that emotion is represented in the brain simply by activation in specialized regions for positive or negative feelings, he says. Credit: Image courtesy of Cornell University.









Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Cornell University. The original article was written by Melissa Osgood. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
Junichi Chikazoe, Daniel H Lee, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Adam K Anderson. (2014, Jun 22). Population coding of affect across stimuli, modalities and individuals. Nature Neuroscience, ePub ahead of print. DOI: 10.1038/nn.3749
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Here is the abstract from the full article, which is sequestered safely behind a paywall, although the article can be yours for the low, low rate of $32.

Population coding of affect across stimuli, modalities and individuals

Junichi Chikazoe, Daniel H Lee, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte & Adam K Anderson

Nature Neuroscience (2014). doi:10.1038/nn.3749 
Received 19 January 2014, Accepted 23 May 2014, Published online 22 June 2014

It remains unclear how the brain represents external objective sensory events alongside our internal subjective impressions of them—affect. Representational mapping of population activity evoked by complex scenes and basic tastes in humans revealed a neural code supporting a continuous axis of pleasant-to-unpleasant valence. This valence code was distinct from low-level physical and high-level object properties. Although ventral temporal and anterior insular cortices supported valence codes specific to vision and taste, both the medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortices (OFC) maintained a valence code independent of sensory origin. Furthermore, only the OFC code could classify experienced affect across participants. The entire valence spectrum was represented as a collective pattern in regional neural activity as sensory-specific and abstract codes, whereby the subjective quality of affect can be objectively quantified across stimuli, modalities and people.

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Are Implanted False Memories Permanent?

Back in the 1980s, there was an explosion of "repressed memories" by children who had suffered satanic abuse in schools, day cares, and family homes. The only problem was that most of these memories were iatrogenic, which means they were "implanted" by their therapists. Before the truth came out (that the majority of these memories were implanted by a small percentage of therapists, a lot of innocent people had their lives literally destroyed.

So what happened to those children and the "false memories" that were implanted in them? This brief article from io9 takes a look at that topic.

Are Implanted False Memories Permanent?

Esther Inglis-Arkell
July 10, 2014

The 1980s saw psychologists discovering a lot of "repressed" memories in patients. As it turned out, they weren't so much memories as inventions. Are all those patients stuck with false memories of Satanic abuse and alternate personalities forever?

In 1973, the book Sybil took the world by storm. A pioneering psychiatrist took a very troubled young woman under her wing. After a lot of therapy and a lot of drugs, she discovered that the eponymous Sybil had many alternate personalities. What was the source of these alternate personalities? Extended therapy revealed that Sybil's mind created them to deal with the horrific abuse she experienced at her mother's hands. As therapy continued, the doctor learned more about the abuse by uncovering memories repressed by Sybil's conscious mind for decades.

The problem is, neither the personalities nor the abuse ever existed. Later records show that Sybil was dependent on the doctor for money and drugs, and tried several times to tell her that she was making everything up. That didn't make it into the book, and it didn't make it into the public discourse. What stayed with people was the idea that they could be unhappy because of deeply repressed memories. A kind of medical entertainment industry flourished as people "remembered" abuse by family, friends, and most famously, Satanic cults. These memories became criminal trials, books, and movies. Eventually, the claims became too fantastic, the defendants got the right lawyers and fact checkers, and many of the most famous "repressed memory" stories went down in a hail of justified lawsuits.

Sybil knew she did not have multiple personality disorder, and she knew most of her "memories" were false. She had come to her psychiatrist as an adult, and had known her motivation for making up false memories. Many of the kids who had remembered "repressed memories" had no such background or context. People began wondering whether medical professionals had forced "memories" of abuse into children's minds, and whether those children would ever be able to remember their real life again.

There is no ethical way of studying the memory of children who have been encouraged to form false memories of extreme abuse, but there have been studies done on children who formed more innocuous false memories. The most famous false memory test was done under the direction of Elizabeth Loftus. Her study showed that people, including children, could have detailed and vivid memories of an event that had been made up and implanted in their heads. Most of the false events were innocuous, like seeing Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, when as a Warner Brothers character, Bugs would never be at Disneyland. One memory was only slightly darker. Participants would remember being lost in a mall until an elderly stranger helped them find their parent. Children between three and six, studies found, were especially susceptible to imagining that a story told to them was their own story.

One study rounded up a group of 22 children who had participated in a Loftus study, two years after the study was over. The researches found that children remembered their true memories about 78 percent of the time, but they only remembered about 13 percent of false memories. This isn't as dramatic a drop as it sounds. The first time around, the children remembered about 22 percent of false memories.

An overall review of studies done on children with false memories is less hopeful. Sometimes children clung to made-up events. How the memory came about was the key factor in whether or not it stuck around. Children who had spontaneously come up with false memories tended to forget them rather easily. Children who were implanted with false memories, who were prompted and guided into specific memories, tended to remember them even more persistently than they remembered real events. The significance, and repetition, of these implanted memories overshadowed the real world. So even if kids are told that they had been coached into remembering a false event, it did nothing to dull the memory.

[Via Long-term Survival of Children's False Memories, Are False Memories Permanent, Misinformation Effects.]

Further Reading

What disease did Sybil, the world's most famous multiple-personality patient, actually have? 

Sybil, the book supposedly based on a real case study, made the concept of multiple personality… Read more

No matter how good your recall is, you still have false memories 
There is a condition known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, in which people can remember … Read more

Neuroscientifically Challenged - "Know Your Brain" Series




Know your brain: Hypothalamus

May 11, 2014

Where is it?

The hypothalamus is the small red dot in these images.


What is it and what does it do?







Tuesday, July 08, 2014





Fantasy or Forecast? A Progressive Agenda for the Supreme Court

- E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College
Posted: 07/04/2014











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