Silver Jacket

Category: Mind/Brain

  • Gift of Gab

    ZooWhile reading about Willams syndrome, I found this:

    One thing [Salk Institute neurolinguist Ursula] Bellugi has documented is the peculiar richness of the Williams child’s vocabulary. For example, when she asked a child with Down syndrome to name all the animals he could think of, the reply was "Dogs, cats, fish, bird, fish." A Williams child of the same age and IQ answered, "Brontosaurus, tyranadon, brontasaurus rex, dinosaurs, elephant, dog, cat, lion, baby hippopotamus, ibex, whale, bull, yak, zebra, puppy, kitten, tiger, koala, dragon."

    If I ever build a zoo I will hire a zoo director with Williams syndrome.

  • Kall and Response

    Nytimes_ketamine

    Washpo_ketamine_1Yesterday the New York Times science section asked, "What is vitamin K good for, and where can it be found?"

    As if reading their minds, on the same day the Washington Post style section wrote, "Ketamine, sweet ketamine, answer to our glutamatergic dreams."

    Let me elaborate. What is K good for?
    A. Chillaxing / Seeing God (depending on dosage.)
    B. Anesthetizing animals, children, and the elderly. (It’s very safe because it doesn’t depress respiration. It’s not used more widely because of occasional side effects; see above.)
    C. Here’s the news: Treating depression.

    A paper published in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry shows that administering sub-psychedelic amounts of ketamine can have antidepressant effects that begin within two hours and last two weeks. Wickid.

    At first I didn’t notice that paper when the August Archives came across my desk. Either because it was unremarkably titled "A randomized trial of an N-methyl-D-aspartate antagonist in treatment-resistant major depression" instead of "Injecting fucking special K makes you trip balls AND totally puts you on cloud nine." Or because we got Oprah Magazine that day. (My job requires that I cast a wide eye on news and trends. Have you seen Oprah’s new hair? OMG.)

    Once I read the study I spotted a mighty confusing line though: "Adverse effects [included]… perceptual disturbances… euphoria… and increased libido." Reminded me of that old Ali G segment where he asks a narcotics agent about hash:

    Ali G: And what is its effects?
    Guy: You can go paranoid, which means you think people or things are coming at you. It makes your heart race. Your blood pressure can go low, so you can feel a bit woozy sometimes. It’s got a lot of medical effects on the body.
    Ali G: And is there any negative effects?

    Bottom line: I’m not sure I’m getting my biweekly recommended dosage of vitamin K. I can’t wait for the chewable Flinstoner version to come out.

    Related: The side effects of vitamin R.

  • Furries are made, not born.

    Gorping

    I’m tempted to let that just sit there, without comment.

    But all you furries out there might waste countless hours searching the nets for the missing frames that would show this "gorping" action more explicitly.

    Cool your jets (and put your dry cleaner on hold.) It’s merely a depiction of a video shown to a set of two-year-old test subjects: Fig. 1 from a paper titled "Learning Words and Rules: Abstract Knowledge of Word Order in Early Sentence Comprehension" in the August issue of Psychological Science. Who knew grammar could be so kinky?

    But seriously, if you want to find gorping, just ask Moby.

    Update: My dear advice-giving friend Liz has now opined on the origin of the furry friend trend. More generally, she advocates:

    I Would Vote for a president who runs on anti-meme. How does it work? It works on the same principle as a hybrid — it stores up potential energy. Every time you stop yourself from creating a delightful and idiotic social trend, the energy gets stored in a battery. That battery is around eight pounds, and the presidential hopeful runs around with it, hitting people.

  • On the Money

    Leary2A review of the new biography of Timothy Leary appearing in the Times today includes the following paragraph:

    In a twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo — he pulled himself along a telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car — and transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act." [emphasis mine]

    The last time I recall seeing someone use that terminology in reference to a piece of writing’s spunkiest moment was in my own hand, aimed at an article I wrote in 2003 for a national physics lab’s magazine. Sending the link to a fellow writer, I wrote, "Be sure to read the final graf for the money shot."

    What was it?

    [LA Times science journalist K.C.] Cole proudly told me what Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, said of her once. "’K.C. Cole is our ambassador to the realms of the exceedingly strange.’" Couldn’t one say the same of 60’s psychonaut Timothy Leary, the Harvard scientist who explored the far reaches of experience with psychotropic drugs in search of insight? Cole laughed. "But my exceedingly strange realm is the universe," she said. "It’s the real stuff. That’s what’s so amazing about it. The universe itself is much more amazing than anything Timothy Leary ever saw. I don’t care what he was on."

    And personally, I think the money shot in the Times piece was its title: "The Nutty Professor." Ahem.

  • Balloons in the Sky with Diamonds

    BalloonLeo Cullum’s cartoon on page 56 of the April 17 New Yorker is basically an illustration of an experimental fiction piece I wrote a decade ago in which acid and dealer are played by balloon and clown. Full trip after the jump.

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  • Funny Boning

    ChesspieceLast week my friend Liz wrote in her advice column: "Questions, questions, questions. Men and women alike love to be drawn out from their selves with QUESTIONS. I keep a file of questions ready for occasions like this." They range from the timely ("Do you identify more with Generation X or Generation Explains-Your-Wearing-Stupid-Clothes?") to the timeless ("Who’s your hottest underage relative?") I have not yet tried any of them as pickup lines, but if you do, please let her or me know how they work out.

    Recently a bunch of pickup approaches actually were put to the test. In February, researchers at Edinburgh published their results on which "opening gambits" work best. Surprise surprise–situations where men organically display generosity or a cultured background work better than preformed pickup lines. (Summary here, full list of gambits here.) But then, the lines included schlock like this:

    M: What has 148 teeth and can hold back the incredible hulk?
    W: I give up.
    M: My fly.

    In Hulk’s place, I would have liked to see one from Nick Sylvester’s infamous Village Voice story about Neil Strauss’s The Game, in which Sylvester refers to someone’s "new signature move, a pickup line that takes over 15 minutes to tell and wraps up like this:

    "Anyway, my friend has had this mustache for as long as I’ve known him but he just shaved it and now he’s freaking out because he has a really bad tan line on his upper lip. He has a date in two days so we were discussing what he can do. My question for you is: Should he wear a fake mustache on the date?"

    (Reconstructing the first 15 minutes of that line would make a great exercise for a creative writing class, but "reporting" on its existence was a riff that lost Sylvester his job.)

    Or the Edinburgh team could have relied on the old fave The Most Complete and Most Useless Collection of Pick-Up Lines, which already has a smattering of data on the utility of many lines. Skim through and you will find that "I wanna put my thingy into your thingy" is surprisingly effective, working 100 out of 120 times. Unsurprisingly, "Chick do now" has worked 0 out of "804,147 (or so one guy claims)" times.

    You’d think "Chick do now" would have amused one of those thousands of women and led to a hookup. Two scientists (Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine) published a study last year in which people rated potential partners on desirability. Subjects viewed head shots with funny and not-so-funny quips attached. Women liked funny men, but apparently men didn’t give a shit whether women were funny. These data didn’t mesh with claims from both men and women that they like partners with a good sense of humor. So B&B did a follow-up study and found that men and women mean different things when they say "good sense of humor." Women like men who say funny things; men like women who think the things they (men) say are funny. (Good summaries of the research here and here. Full PDFs available here.)

    French maximizer La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "We often pardon those people who bore us, but we cannot pardon those who find us boring." Modern-day research has now demonstrated the utter male-centricity of this particular maxim. (Whereas the male-centricity of this Maxim was never in question.)

    The flirting research came to bear in an IM chat with Liz last month:

    liz: what do you think about the notion:
    men: use conversation to establish dominance
    women: use conversation as gift to establish togetherness/equality
    me: ya
    me: like that humor study
    me: girls like funny guys, guys like girls who think they’re funny
    liz: humor is the ultimate trick – it tricks guys into thinking they’ve become dominant by making girls laugh. it tricks girls into thinking they’ve been offered a gift by the man to induce togetherness
    liz: what happens though when i tell a humor-joke?
    me: no effect
    me: guys don’t care
    liz: is gilda radner funny?
    me: ya
    liz: is that good?
    me: ya
    me: i need funny. i am not most guys
    liz: oh so you’re saying certain guys, it’s a plus
    liz: but guys guys don’t care
    liz: how can i know the difference
    me: you cant
    me: ok you can
    me: do they attempt to elicit humor from you
    liz: seems so simple, and yet i’d never have come up with it
    me: i have lots of experience attempting to elicit humor from chicks
    me: its my litmus test
    me: if they fall flat, too basic, i lose interest
    liz: how do you do it
    me: leading, snarky questions can work
    liz: example?
    me: last night i replied to [redacted]’s friendster message. her profile says she wants to meet someone who can procure a butterfly knife. i said:
    me: "Why do you wish so badly to procure a butterfly knife? What do you have against butterflies? (Or is it merely a person who can easily obtain one that you wish to find? You’re into bad boys/girls.)"
    me: not brilliant, but it should work
    liz: but isn’t that just showing off your creativity/humor, more than eliciting hers?
    me: its both. thats the key.
    liz: yeh

  • The kids! They’re everywhere!

    Last week I wrote about what happens when some kids take Ritalin. (Delusional parasitosis, aka crank bugs.) This week the New Yorker caption contest reveals what happens when their teachers take the drug:

    Teacher_caption
    "I see small people."

  • Cootie Fever

    Christina_1There are already many reasons to do Ritalin. It improves focus, mood, and motivation. It’s also stronger than blow and, with health insurance, cheaper than Starbucks. But in case you haven’t heard, it produces hallucinations too, free of charge. According to the Times last week:

    Dr. Kate Gelperin, an F.D.A. drug-safety specialist, [said] that the agency had discovered a surprising number of cases in which young children given stimulants suffered hallucinations. Most said that they saw or felt insects, snakes or worms, Dr. Gelperin said.

    Dr. Gelperin described the case of a 12-year-old girl who said that insects were crawling under her skin. Another child was found by his parents crawling on the ground and complaining that he was surrounded by cockroaches.

    Fun times.

    The specificity and commonality of the delusions are striking. One could be forgiven for blaming South Park as a common priming stimulus. In a particular episode, Cartman takes Ritalin and sees an insect-like Pink Christina Aguilera Monster crawling around. Perhaps this cartoon creation, this media meme, has burrowed into the psyches of kids across the nation.

    Or not. What should be more striking is the recency of the reports of these delusions. Common stimulants (coke, meth, Ritalin, caffeine) block neurons from deactivating the neurotransmitter dopamine. An excess of synaptic dopamine can cause psychosis. Doctors have even given a name to the particular wig-out reported above: delusional parasitosis. Speed freaks have a name for it too: crank bugs. According to a 1969 article in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, "It is common to see speed freaks with open running sores or scabs on their faces or arms as a result of picking or cutting out these hallucinated crank bugs." Word to the wise: if you ever catch one, I hear they go great with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

    But you don’t need drugs to see bugs. This article titled "Insects in Psychiatry" explains: "Insects have profoundly influenced our culture through time, and it is therefore not surprising that they feature prominently in some psychiatric disorders." The author draws the history of delusions of parasitosis in the med mags back to a pub date of 1894, years before vitamin R was invented, and even longer before Christina Aguilera infested our lives.

  • Take Two and Love Me in the Morning

    Happy_pillPsychologist and writer Lauren Slater published an essay in the Times a few days ago with a warning to psychotropic pill poppers: "Buyer beware." Hype followed by disappointment fills the historical landscape of pharmaceutical wonderdrugs, from chlorpromazine to Ambien. She notes: "I’m surprised we haven’t yet created chemical cures for those mourning their chemical cures."

    Oh, but dear Lauren, we have! On March 6, The Onion reported: "The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers." Side effects include "ignoring the side effects of prescription drug medication."

    Snarky aside: Slater is a great writer, and I’m sure she’s a great psychologist, but I’m glad she’s not a psychiatrist. She writes, "I like the idea that human hope has a half-life of about 10 years and is fully excreted in two decades". I like the idea of a doctor who understands what half-life means.

  • The Mannequin Within Us All

    What happens when you lock a woman in a tiny room with a mannequin for 11 days? This:

    Mom never fully recovered from this experiment. Neither did Mandy. (She disappeared in 1998; the last time I saw her she was modeling a dress made of pretzels for my friend Yvonne in an art show. (My mannequin, not my mom.))

    Full transcript, plus outtakes, after the jump.

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