HENRY

Kenneth Chang in the NY Times talks about The Grim Story of Maya Blue:

The vibrant sky color can be seen on pottery, murals and other artifacts produced by the Maya people of Central America centuries ago and the unusual, durable pigment remains vibrant today long after other colors have faded away.

It was also the color of Chaak, the rain god, and of human sacrifice.

Oh this is going to be a scandal - a large-scale meta-analysis of anti-depressant medication has shown that Prozac, the third most prescribed antidepressant in the US, doesn’t work.

The paper (Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration) obtained all the clinical trial information from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the six most widely-prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) - fluoxetine (i.e. Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), nefazodone (Serzone), paroxetine (Seroxat, Paxil), sertraline (Zoloft, Lustral), and citalopram. The authors then compared the effect of these SSRIs to a placebo (a pill with no effect).

Strikingly the results of this meta-analysis show that “the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medications is below recommended criteria for clinical significance”. Or, the effect of these drugs is not significantly different to that of the placebos. Even more damning, the authors show that whilst the SSRIs have more of an effect on people with higher levels of depression, this is because the placebos stop working as well at higher levels of depression.

The Guardian has some excellent coverage on this paper, where they quote one of the co-authors:

“Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed,” says Kirsch. “This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported.”

Ouch, and what’s worse, once these findings get reported in the media, all that placebo effect is going to disappear too, making these as worthless as candy.

Kirsch, I., Deacon, B.J., Huedo-Medina, T.B., Scoboria, A., Moore, T.J., Johnson, B.T. (2008). Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. PLoS Medicine, 5(2), e45. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045

Long-term readers will know that I’ve got a number of friends working on the wonderfully intelligent New Caledonian Crow. These birds make and use a number of different tools for extracting grubs from logs. You can see my catalogue of posts on these birds here.

Recently, they’ve got a new paper out showing that the brains of these crows is large and more encephalized than other crow species (corvids) and most of the other birds studied. The paper is here: Extraordinary large brains in tool-using New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides), and the abstract says:

A general correlation exists between brain weight and higher cognitive ability in birds and mammals. In birds this relationship is especially evident in corvids. These animals are well-known for their flexible behavior and problem-solving abilities, and have relatively large brains associated with a pallial enlargement.

At the behavioral level, New Caledonian crows stand out amongst corvids because of their impressive object manipulation skills both in the wild and in the laboratory. However, nothing is known about the relative size of their brains.

Here we show that NC crows have highly encephalised brains relative to most other birds that have been studied. We compared the relative brain size of five NC crows with combined data for four passerine species (7 European carrion crows, 2 European magpies, 3 European jays and 4 domestic sparrows) and found that NC crows had significantly larger brains.

A comparison only with the seven carrion crows also revealed significantly larger brains for NC crows. When compared with brain data for 140 avian species from the literature, the NC crow had one of the highest degrees of encephalisation, exceeding that of the 7 other Corvidae in the data set.

They’re after our children now: Socialization between toddlers and robots at an early childhood education center:

A state-of-the-art social robot was immersed in a classroom of toddlers for >5 months. The quality of the interaction between children and robots improved steadily for 27 sessions, quickly deteriorated for 15 sessions when the robot was reprogrammed to behave in a predictable manner, and improved in the last three sessions when the robot displayed again its full behavioral repertoire. Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last sessions, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than as a toy. Results indicate that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for sustained periods of time and that it could have great potential in educational settings assisting teachers and enriching the classroom environment.

More details of the impending takeover at ScienceNow… Watch out! -

Here’s a new occasional segment that I’m going to run on Henry: The Stupid Science Terminology Award.  This week, the award goes to the National Geographic News, for inflicting upon us the nausea-inducing term “brainbow”:

In their effort to tease out the details of connections in the nervous system, Lichtman and his colleagues developed about 30 lines of mice.

The team incorporated a chain of three different fluorescent protein genes—which they call a brainbow—into these mice.

A study in NeuroImage suggests that language and music are processed by the same underlying brain systems. Using EEG (which has really good temporal sensitivity), the authors presented subjects with melodies that were violated in one of three ways:

1) Rule-only violations: where the melody contained out-of-key deviant notes that violated the tonal harmony rules in melodies that were unfamiliar to the listener.
2) Memory-only violations: where the melody contained notes that followed musical rules, but deviated from the actual melody known to the listener.
3) Both memory and rule violations: the notes in the melody violated both musical rules and memory.

The results of this study show a double-dissociation between the rule violations and the memory violations where both the rule violation conditions (1 & 3) but not the memory-only condition (2) caused an early negative event-related potential (ERP), localised to the anterior central right hemisphere.

This is strikingly similar to the “N400” ERP which is seen when subjects are presented with rule-based violations of linguistic stimuli (e.g. “I like my coffee with cream and dog“), which suggests that music and language are both subserved by similar processing systems.

The full paper will be out later in the year: Double dissociation between rules and memory in music: An event-related potential study, but until then, ScienceDaily has a brief write-up.

Jonathan Haidt at talks about moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion at Edge:

In what follows I will take it for granted that religion is a part of the natural world that is appropriately studied by the the methods of science. Whether or not God exists (…), religiosity is an enormously important fact about our species.There must be some combination of evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories that can explain why human religious practices take the various forms that they do, many of which are so similar across cultures and eras.

It’s an excellent article that takes a cutting edge approach to the psychology of religion. Go check it out.