• 18:36 Did people take stupid pills today? really? there must be a reason... #
• 23:19 @TLinder - Oh hai. #
• 11:02 120 db of breakcore before noon isn't really what I was up for...eh, gotta run with it I guess. #
• 11:03 It's so goddamned good though, really unsettling...nothing usually unsettles me. #
• 11:09 I just realized the horrific mistake I just made by NOT bullshitting that I still live in my studio. *CRIES* at least I still have my soul. #
• 11:12 kicks self repeatedly. #
• 11:43 Yanno, if this is for real, it is some funny shit. Moby at the DNC: #
• 11:43 tinyurl.com/6qywzr #

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/08/wilder_penfield_ch.html

Neurophilosophy has a stimulating article on Wilder Penfield, the legendary Canadian neurosurgeon who pionered neuropsychological studies on the awake patient during brain surgery.

Penfield is most famous for his experiments where he electrically stimulated the brain of patients who had part of their skull removed during surgery to record what thoughts, behaviours and sensations arose from the excitation of specific parts of the cortex.

This research is still being done in modern times. My favourite is a 1991 study on electrical stimulation of the supplementary motor area SMA) by (no laughing now) Fried and colleagues.

What is most fascinating is that they found electrical stimulation could trigger the urge to movement or the expactation that a movement might occur, without triggering any movement itself. This stretched from quite vague feelings such as the "need to do something with right
hand" to very specific movement intentions such as the "urge to move right thumb and index finger".

The gripping and typically well-researched Neurophilosophy article takes us right into the middle of one of these experiments performed by Penfield, and goes on to explain how his work became so influential in science and medicine.

Penfield was a pupil of Harvey Cushing, considered the founder of scientific neurosurgery, who was featured only last week on the same excellent blog.

Unlike Cushing though, who was reknowned for being a bit spiky, Penfield was widely considered to be a warm and friendly individual.

It's probably the best article on Penfield you're likely to find on the net, so well worth taking the opportunity of learning more about this key figure in our understanding of the brain.

Link to article 'Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer'.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on Wilder's operation on his sister.

http://www.forteantimes.com/blogs/editorial-blogs/news/1063542/2882008-headlines.thtml

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/08/unreality_tv_and_the.html

Today's New York Times has an interesting article on the tug-of-war over the cultural influence on paranoid delusions and whether contemporary-themed psychosis is a new form of mental illness or just a modern colouring of an old disorder.

The article focuses on the recent interest in the 'Truman Show delusion', splashed over the media by two Canadian psychiatrists.

It's quite hard to judge what they're aiming to do as they've not published a scientific paper, and the article suggests they're writing a book (is that the sounds of alarm bells I hear?), so I'm solely going on secondary sources.

But if they're saying that delusions specifically about being in the Truman Show are somehow new and interesting, then they're right in a way. Popular culture often turns up in paranoid beliefs - I worked with a gentleman once who believed he was in The Matrix - but its not earth shattering. It happens all the time.

If they're saying that the general experience of The Truman Show - feeling that the world is being controlled, is unexplainably altered, or is uncannily mysterious - is somehow new, then they're wrong by a good 100 years.

This was described by the German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers in the early part of the 20th century who called it Wahnstimmung, which is translated in the modern English literature as delusional mood or delusional atmosphere.

This is the description from Andrew Sims' book on descriptive psychopathology Symptoms in the Mind:

"For the patient experiencing delusional atmosphere, his world has been subtly altered 'Something funny is going on'; 'I have been offered a whole new world of meaning'. He experiences everything around him as sinister, portentous, uncanny, peculiar in an undefinable way. He knows that he is personally involved but cannot tell how. He has the feeling of anticipation, sometimes even of excitement, that soon all the separate parts of his experience will to reveal something immensely significant."

Actually, the article has a quote from me, although miscasts my view a little. I'm quoted as saying:

“Cultural influences don’t tell us anything fundamental about delusion,” said Vaughan Bell, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, who has studied Internet delusion.

“We can look at the influence of television, computer games, rock ’n’ roll, but these things don’t tell us about new forms of being mentally ill,” said Dr. Bell, who said he had also treated patients who believed they were part of a reality television show.

Actually, I do think that cultural influences are fundamental in understanding delusions, but not in themselves. [Squiggly sound of tape rewinding] It seems the crucial qualification "in themselves" was missed off the quote.

In fact, in the paper I wrote on delusions about the internet I concluded by saying "The extent of influence may not be equal for all aspects of society and culture, although the fact that there is an influence at all, suggests that psychosis is only fully understandable in light of the wider social context."

To quote John Donne, "no man is an island" and we can only fully understand or thoughts and behaviour, either everyday or pathological, with reference to the cultures we live in. But this doesn't mean that each aspect of cultural influences us equally on all levels.

Link to NYT article 'Look Closely, Doctor: See the Camera?'.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/08/the_musics_too_loud.html

Today's Nature has a teeth-grittingly bitchy review of psychologist Daniel Levitin's new music and psychology book The World In Six Songs that would be entertaining were it not so surprisingly vitriolic.

I've not read the book, but when someone is criticising the author's musical taste as immature, not once, but twice, in the world's leading science publication, you know the review has gone beyond the point of healthy knock-about into the zone of below-the-belt punches.

What is it about Nature book reviews? We covered one in 2007 where the reviewer got stuck in despite not seeming to have read the book.

Actually, no one does a good book barney like the philosophers, who at least have the good grace to wrap their barbs in dry wit and satire rather than just spitting venom at each other (although they do that too).

If you want to get an idea of Levitin's basic premise, New Scientist has an online article on the book. It seems to be applying the 'basic plots' idea to music.

This is widely discussed in literature where many people have claimed to have identified the seven, eight, twenty, thirty six (you get the idea) basic plots in stories, literature and plays throughout history.

Link to hatchet job in Nature.
Link to NewSci on The World In Six Songs.

• 17:04 Finally just had the "big idea" of what to call one of my new designs. Naming = fun. #
• 18:31 Oh hai. Biggest design boner evar. "Plaid habit" coming momentarily. #
• 18:54 zee origin of said boner: flickr.com/photos/toybreaker/2800811409/ #
• 21:42 Just made garden tomato, basil, red onion, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, cracked pepper, sea salt salad. Yum! Priority re-alignment week. #
• 22:37 @cobweb - recipe? (or link?) I've been wanting to make that for a while. #
• 22:37 Stupid vegetables, I'm hungry again. #
• 23:39 @anditron - thank you, why am I starting web programming at 12:30? BECAUSE I HAVE TO have them up. ;) #
• 11:47 Don't EVER watch "Dirty Jobs: Dairy Farm Edition" before bed. Leads to dreams of terrifying, unspeakable horror. #
• 13:31 ikea mobile prepared for journey into consumerist bliss. #

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/08/who_needs_sleep_the.html

PLoS Biology has a cozy essay entitled "Is Sleep Essential?" that addresses the mystery of the purpose of sleep.

The article looks at sleep across the whole of the animal kingdom to examine how different species sleep and whether there are any animals that don't sleep at all.

There are no convincing cases of sleepless animals it seems, and the authors, neuroscientists Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, argue that sleep is therefore likely to be an essential function of living creatures.

The three corollaries of the null hypothesis ['sleep is not required'] do not seem to square well with the available evidence: there is no convincing case of a species that does not sleep, no clear instance of an animal that forgoes sleep without some compensatory mechanism, and no indication that one can truly go without sleep without paying a high price. What many concluded long ago still seems to hold: the case is strong for sleep serving one or more essential functions. But which ones?

The article goes on to examine the hypotheses that sleep is important for regulating the body's core functions, the brain, individual cells and that it is common to all species and must involve something that cannot be provided by quiet wakefulness.

More interesting is the question of whether all animals dream - and perhaps most intriguing, if so, how they might dream.

Indeed, it would be interesting to discover whether dreaming is a necessary function of sleep, or whether it is specifically linked to certain neurocognitive processes or even particular creatures.

Link to PLoS Biology article 'Is Sleep Essential?' (via Wired Science).

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/plutonica/~3/376344082/

http://plutonica.net/?p=422

Best remembered by mainstream science as John Whiteside Parsons, inventor of the solid fuel that helped make space travel possible, occultists know Jack Parsons as a devoted Thelemite, chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead the Ordo Templi Orientis’ Agape Lodge in California in the early forties.

The  comic, titled “The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons“, is written by Richard Carbonneau and illustrated by Robin Simon.  The story follows Parsons’ life closely, beginning with his childhood and adolescence, carrying through to adulthood. 

A new essay by Parsons was published by Teitan Press in June, also reproducing “Freedom is a Two Edged Sword” in Three Essays on Freedom, and now a new biographical comic.  The beginnings of a Parsons revival?

Via Technoccult.

a

New biographical comic about Jack Parsons

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/plutonica/~3/376206820/

http://plutonica.net/?p=417

Ouroboros Press is set to release the second volume of the Picatrix on October 18th, 2008.

To commemorate the event, a book release party will be held on that day in Historic Pioneer Square at the Rodriguez Guerra Art Studio where publisher William Kiesel will be signing.

A description of the book from the Ouroboros Press blog, The Serpent Bites Its Tail:

Picatrix Volume Two contains the 3rd and 4th books of Ghayat Al-Hakim and will complete the English translation. It is a larger book than volume one and contains much in the way of the practical working of astral and talismanic magic. Planetary and Zodiacal magic and full instructions for invoking the related spirits are provided along with all the requisite materials needed; stones, plants, inks, colors, incenses, talismans and the invocations.

In addition to this are many anecdotes relating to Arabic and pre-Islamic magical lore, including the writings of Ibn Wahshija, the Nabataeans, Sabians, Chaldeans and Assyrians. Of particular note is the magical plant and mineral lore from the Nabataean Agriculture, which portray ancient practices of pagan Iraq.

The trade cloth edition will be , and the deluxe black leather edition limited to 500 copies will run 0.

For more information and to order, see the Ouroboros Press blog.

a

Ouroboros Press to release volume two of the Picatrix in October

http://www.forteantimes.com/blogs/editorial-blogs/news/1063233/2782008-headlines.thtml

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/08/extracting_the_stone.html

Art-science blog Bioemphemera has an excellent piece on how Renaissance artists depicted madness as involving a stone in the head. Numerous paintings from the 16th and 17th century show operations to remove the stone and presumably cure the insane of their 'folly'.

Despite the widespread depiction of this procedure, many examples of which are wonderfully illustrated in the Bioemphemera post, it's not clear whether these paintings were documenting widespread practices of medical fakery, or whether they were entirely metaphorical.

Perhaps owing to this element of mystery, and to the striking artworks, the topic is often featured in science and medical journals.

A 1999 article in Trends in Neurosciences is probably the most comprehensive treatment, and makes an excellent complement to the Bioephemera piece.

Link to Bioephemera post 'The Stone of Madness'.
Link to TINS article 'Psychosurgery in Renaissance art'.
Link to PubMed entry for article.

• 17:45 Why is mon jin lau so far away? Want happy hour/happy ending! #
• 19:09 Do you have any beach themed ties? For real? WTF do you think!?! Hold on while I pull this flamingo out of my ass. #
• 19:11 @function13 - you must be so sick of it, if I worked there I'd go every damned day. :) #
• 19:18 @burnlab - flamingos are just a little to close to home for me now, literally and figuratively. Down with the pink buzzards! #
• 19:44 @burnlab in the works!! ;) shh #
• 21:04 stupid pigs. Next time you cut me off, pass on the right? Use signal plz! #
• 23:15 Research on Biden is turning my stomach. RAVE act, anti net-neutrality RIAA fucktard? We're so screwed. #
• 23:18 Oh Canada! #
• 23:25 @macrossactual yeah, I had no idea he was all anti-encryption, anti-Robotussin, pro-surveillance. I can has a Kucinich, Paul or Clark plz? #
• 23:26 @macrossactual oh yeah, Diebold would take care of them too. #
• 00:53 @milktongue - I hope, I just don't trust any of them. I'm certainly not for McGrandpaSame either, I just hate all the choices. #
• 10:11 This whole getting my "second wind" at 2am is really crap. I keep having unrealized expectations of getting up super early. booo. #
• 13:16 bizzy day! fun projects, just lots of them. Sadly, looks like seeing Mr.Glover today will be glaringly improbable. Drat. Too far. #
• 13:20 @function13 - I find it entertaining how we all get to work on somewhat fun projects in our old age for car companies. fashions + technos! #
• 13:51 The exodus can stop. Really. The last "I'm leaving" message just hurt a bit. :( Abbot??? Christ. #
• 14:12 "so you can print me some santa's on ties?" honey, let me introduce you to krampus. #
• 14:21 Not a good day to be flying, whoops! #