Simon Baron-Cohen: Inter-generational patterns of abuse

Imagine you’re in a shopping mall car park when you witness a woman scream at her child “I hate you! You’re an evil bastard! I’m leaving! You can look after yourself! I’m done looking after you! Good riddance. You don’t deserve a mother! I’ll kill myself and then perhaps you’ll realize you should have treated me better!” and then getting into the car, slamming the car door behind her, and driving off at high speed.

How should we, as witnesses to this scene, react to such words and actions that can cause deep emotional scars in the young child they are directed at? No doubt like you, I would find it deeply distressing and experience an urge to protect the child and condemn the mother for her hurtful behaviour.

But as a psychologist a further thought kicks in: Perhaps this mother herself also deserves our compassion. What has happened in her life to render her so overwhelmed that, in a moment of anger, she can no longer control herself and instead vents her most aggressive thoughts and feelings, and loses any empathy for her own child?

The study of Borderline Personality Disorder reveals strong links with an early history of insecure attachment to a caregiver, itself a consequence of early neglect or abuse. John Bowlby’s powerful concept of attachment reveals the long-term ‘sleeper effects’ of missing out on parental affection. Thirty years later, these can wreak havoc on one’s own capacity to parent.

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Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Autism Research Centre there. His new book is ‘Zero Degrees of Empathy’ (Penguin UK) and is published in the US under the title ‘The Science of Evil’ (Basic Books).

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Commonplace

In Matthew 10:8 we are instructed to "heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, and cast out demons!" 

As Kingdom citizens this verse should be commonplace, an everyday occurrence. But too often we think these acts are reserved for ministers or those with a special anointing. I long for the day, and it's coming, when we all engage in these ordinary activities. I want that for me and I want that for you. When miracles become common we'll stop comparing our ministries with each other. I love this quote from John Wimber:

"When everyone and anyone can heal the sick, cast out a demon or prophesy, then the danger of anyone becoming overly impressed with the minister is diminished." -- John Wimber

Male-to-female transsexuals have "male" brains

People with "gender dysphoria" feel as though their sexual identity doesn't match their biological sex. A popular theory is that such people have a brain with physical characteristics that match the sex they identify with. So, for a man who feels like he is a woman - a male-to-female transsexual - the proposal is that he has a female brain "trapped" in a male body. Now in one of the first studies of its kind, Ivanak Savic and Stefan Arver have scanned the brains of 24 heterosexual, pre-operative male-to-female transsexuals and compared their structure to the brains of 24 heterosexual male and 24 heterosexual female controls. Homosexual transsexuals were omitted to help avoid the complicating influence of sexuality on the results. None of the transsexual participants had taken any hormone treatments, which is another factor that could have skewed the findings.

The scans threw up several of the structural brain differences associated with biological sex that have been reported before. For example, the men's brains had more grey matter in the cerebellum (involved in motor control) and lingual gyrus (involved in vision) and less gray matter and white matter in the precentral sulcus (part of the frontal lobe), compared with the women's brains. The men also had smaller hippocampi (involved in memory) than the women. In all these respects the brains of the male-to-female transexuals resembled the brains of the male control group. Likewise, the male-to-female transsexuals, like the male controls, had more asymmetric brains than the female controls. "The present study does not support the dogma that male-to-female transsexuals have atypical sex dimorphism in the brain but confirms the previously reported sex differences in structural volumes, gray, and white matter fractions," the researchers said. In other words, the male-to-female transsexuals may have felt like women, but their brains had structural characteristics typical of men.

But that's not to say that the male-to-female transsexual participants had brains that were unremarkable. Compared with the male and female controls, they had a smaller thalamus (the brain's relay centre) and putamen (an area involved in motor control) and increased gray matter in the right insula and inferior frontal cortex (regions involved in representing the body, among other functions). Savic and Arver advised treating these differences with caution. They've never been found before so need to be replicated with a larger sample. And even if confirmed, it's not clear what these differences mean, or whether they are a cause or consequence of gender dysphoria. "One highly speculative thought is that the enlargement of the ... insular and inferior frontal cortex ... could derive from a constant rumination about one's own body," the researchers said.

More research is needed, with larger samples and including studies of homosexual transsexuals and female-to-male transsexuals. "Any interpretation must, therefore, proceed cautiously and can at this point only be highly speculative," the researchers said.
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Savic, I., and Arver, S. (2011). Sex Dimorphism of the Brain in Male-to-Female Transsexuals. Cerebral Cortex, 21 (11), 2525-2533 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhr032

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

RIP Andre Hodeir (1921-2011)

Jazz polymath/Messiaen composition pupil /writer/ producer/ composer/ magazine editor Andre Hodeir died yesterday at the age of 90. There is a fine obituary in French on the Radio France website giving the extent and importance of his influence on the French scene. He made his biggest mark in the  Anglo-Saxon world with the book "Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence," and within it, the essay on the form of Concerto for Cootie . RIP.

Review : Submotion Orchestra

Submotion Orchestra
(XOYO, Shoreditch, 31st October 2011. Review by Adam Tait)

As I stood, happily sipping, among the expectant crowd in XOYO in Shoreditch, I wondered how many of the people around me were aware that the incredible, genre morphing, act they were waiting for was the result of an Arts Council commission. It seems almost bizarre for a project launched by the Arts Council, for performance in York Minster, to be so aware of the youth culture as to attempt a live dubstep project. It seems even more bizarre that that project has found such tremendous respect and success.

Perhaps Submotion Orchestra’s level of accomplishment is not so surprising when you consider the constituent parts of this six-piece. Most of them are glowing alumni of Leeds College of Music. They all play in multiple bands, for the most part stretching across numerous genres. The band was formed around DJ Dom ‘Ruckspin’ Howard and drummer Tommy Evans back in 2009. Both are incredibly prolific. Howard is ridiculously in demand as a DJ and producer, and is a classically trained viola player. Evans has a bit of himself in more pies than he has fingers. Drummer not just with Submotion, but also with rising stars of the English reggae/dub scene Gentlemen’s Dub Club, Evans also plays with jazz group IDST and runs Leeds’ infamous jazz night The Spin Off. His jazz credentials are further reinforced by the fact that he was commissioned by Marsden Jazz Festival and Jazz Yorkshire to produce a special suite for the 2010 festival. Vocalist Ruby Wood, another graduate of Leeds College of music’s jazz course, also lends her honeyed voice to hiphop/funk group Extra Curricular and a capella group Solaris, as well as pursuing her own solo project Loopology (not to mention being an accomplished steel pan player). Perhaps bearing all this in mind, your expectations might get somewhere close to adequate. But still not quite.

Submotion Orchestra are far more than the sum of their parts. Coming together they are an incredible, cacophonous, sonic force. A concussive blast that stuns audiences into a hypnotised stupor. A beautiful contradiction between an astonishing delicacy and a brutal, sub-bass heaviness. Wistfully jazzy pauses, punctuated by blast of brass, dive into long anticipated, truly ground shaking, bass drives. Exceptionally intricate hi-hat patterns sit nonchalantly behind layers and layers of synth-generated sub-bass and enchanting keyboard runs from Taz Modi, concurrently dipping toes in fast paced jazz and indulgently bass focused dubstep. The casual and entirely fitting segues into the samba-esque beats of Danny Templeman’s percussion provide yet another, almost not needed, demonstration of this band’s musical genius, both as individuals and as a collective. It’s not just the sonic detonation issued by the bass bins that confounds the audience into a hypnotised sway, but also the incredible talent on display.

This group might have got together with the aim of developing a live dubstep act. But it’s unfair to call this band dubstep. Not least because of the remarkably well informed forays into countless other musical genres - jazz, soul, ambient electro and dubstep’s forefather dub – but also because this group are so many leagues ahead of everything else that’s going on within dubstep at the moment. ‘Head and shoulders above’ doesn’t even come close to being an adequate description. They are, as an entity, a remarkable musical achievement, a skilful blending of a myriad of musical disciplines. This band are truly a band that have something to give to everyone, from all musical backgrounds, and it is important that people from jazz and soul and classical backgrounds are not put off by the ‘dubstep’ tag that is commonly attached to them, because they are so much more than that.

Submotion Orchestra

How walking through a doorway increases forgetting

Like information in a book, unfolding events are stored in human memory in successive chapters or episodes. One consequence is that information in the current episode is easier to recall than information in a previous episode. An obvious question then is how the mind divides experience up into these discrete episodes? A new study led by Gabriel Radvansky shows that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it more difficult to recall information pertaining to an experience in the room that's just been left behind.

Dozens of participants used computer keys to navigate through a virtual reality environment presented on a TV screen. The virtual world contained 55 rooms, some large, some small. Small rooms contained one table; large rooms contained two: one at each end. When participants first encountered a table, there was an object on it that they picked up (once carried, objects could no longer be seen). At the next table, they deposited the object they were carrying at one end and picked up a new object at the other. And on the participants went. Frequent tests of memory came either on entering a new room through an open doorway, or after crossing halfway through a large room. An object was named on-screen and the participants had to recall if it was either the object they were currently carrying or the one they'd just set down.

The key finding is that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]" the researchers said.

But what if this result was only found because of the simplistic virtual reality environment? In a second study, Radvansky and his collaborators created a real-life network of rooms with tables and objects. Participants passed through this real environment picking up and depositing objects as they went, and again their memory was tested occasionally for what they were carrying (hidden from view in a box) or had most recently deposited. The effect of doorways was replicated. Participants were more likely to make memory errors after they'd passed through a doorway than after they'd travelled the same distance in a single room.

Another interpretation of the findings is that they have nothing to do with the boundary effect of a doorway, but more to do with the memory enhancing effect of context (the basic idea being that we find it easier to recall memories in the context that we first stored them). By this account, memory is superior when participants remain in the same room because that room is the same place that their memory for the objects was first encoded.

Radvansky and his team tested this possibility with a virtual reality study in which memory was probed after passing through a doorway into a second room, passing through two doorways into a third unfamiliar room, or through two doorways back to the original room - the one where they'd first encountered the relevant objects. Performance was no better when back in the original room compared with being tested in the second room, thus undermining the idea that this is all about context effects on memory. Performance was worst of all when in the third, unfamiliar room, supporting the account based on new memory episodes being created on entering each new area.

These findings show how a physical feature of the environment can trigger a new memory episode. They concur with a study published earlier this year which focused on episode markers in memories for stories. Presented with a passage of narrative text, participants later found it more difficult to remember which sentence followed a target sentence, if the two were separated by an implied temporal boundary, such as "a while later ...". It's as if information within a temporal episode was somehow bound together, whereas a memory divide was placed between information spanning two episodes.
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Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64 (8), 1632-1645 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.571267

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Teapot

"The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks." -- Luke 6:45

Most of us can dig down into our childhood memories and recite the song: "I'm A Little Teapot." And in a lot of ways we are exactly like a teapot. When we get "all steamed up" whatever is in our pot will overflow and pour out on others. The Bible is clear that whatever is in our heart will eventually come out of our mouth.

I'm a little teapot, short and stout.

Here is my handle, here is my spout.

When I get all steamed up, hear me shout.

Just tip me over and pour me out.