Does "22q11 Deletion Syndrome" Set the Stage for the 'Voices' that Are Symptom of Schizophrenia

There has never, so far, been a convincing genetic link for schizophrenia, until now. People who have the human genetic disorder 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. The syndrome occurs when part of chromosome 22, near the middle, is deleted and individuals are left with one rather than the usual two copies of about 25 genes. 

Here is some more from the NIH "Genetics Home Reference":

22q11.2 deletion syndrome has many possible signs and symptoms that can affect almost any part of the body. The features of this syndrome vary widely, even among affected members of the same family. Common signs and symptoms include heart abnormalities that are often present from birth, an opening in the roof of the mouth (a cleft palate), and distinctive facial features. People with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome often experience recurrent infections caused by problems with the immune system, and some develop autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and Graves disease in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues and organs. Affected individuals may also have breathing problems, kidney abnormalities, low levels of calcium in the blood (which can result in seizures), a decrease in blood platelets (thrombocytopenia), significant feeding difficulties, gastrointestinal problems, and hearing loss. Skeletal differences are possible, including mild short stature and, less frequently, abnormalities of the spinal bones.

Many children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome have developmental delays, including delayed growth and speech development, and learning disabilities. Later in life, they are at an increased risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. Additionally, affected children are more likely than children without 22q11.2 deletion syndrome to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and developmental conditions such as autism spectrum disorders that affect communication and social interaction.

Because the signs and symptoms of 22q11.2 deletion syndrome are so varied, different groupings of features were once described as separate conditions. Doctors named these conditions DiGeorge syndrome, velocardiofacial syndrome (also called Shprintzen syndrome), and conotruncal anomaly face syndrome. In addition, some children with the 22q11.2 deletion were diagnosed with the autosomal dominant form of Opitz G/BBB syndrome and Cayler cardiofacial syndrome. Once the genetic basis for these disorders was identified, doctors determined that they were all part of a single syndrome with many possible signs and symptoms. To avoid confusion, this condition is usually called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, a description based on its underlying genetic cause.

An estimated 1 in 4,000 people have 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. About 30 percent of individuals with the deletion syndrome develop schizophrenia, making it one of the strongest risk factors for the disorder

For the sake of reference, about 1 in 100 people will develop schizophrenia, 1.1%, while the rate the deletion syndrome is .00025%. Clearly, there are a LOT of people presenting with schizophrenia who do not have the deletion syndrome.

This syndrome apparently can cause increased expression of Drd2 in the thalamus, and Drd2 is associated with D2 dopamine receptors. The researchers identified a specific disruption of synaptic transmission at thalamocortical glutamatergic projections in the auditory cortex in mouse models of schizophrenia-associated 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS). This deficit is caused by an unusual elevation of Drd2 in the thalamus, which renders 22q11DS thalamocortical projections sensitive to antipsychotics. 

The downside of this research is that there will be new drugs developed to target the voices heard by those with schizophrenia, despite mounting evidence that befriending the voices is better long-term solution than psychopharmacological interventions.

Brain circuit problem likely sets stage for the 'voices' that are symptom of schizophrenia

Date: June 5, 2014
Source: St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

Summary: Scientists have identified problems in a connection between brain structures that may predispose individuals to hearing the 'voices' that are a common symptom of schizophrenia. Researchers linked the problem to a gene deletion. This leads to changes in brain chemistry that reduce the flow of information between two brain structures involved in processing auditory information.

Conceptual illustration (stock image). Scientists have identified problems in a connection between brain structures that may predispose individuals to hearing the "voices" that are a common symptom of schizophrenia.  Credit: © yalayama / Fotolia

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have identified problems in a connection between brain structures that may predispose individuals to hearing the "voices" that are a common symptom of schizophrenia. The work appears in the June 6 issue of the journal Science.

Researchers linked the problem to a gene deletion. This leads to changes in brain chemistry that reduce the flow of information between two brain structures involved in processing auditory information.

The research marks the first time that a specific circuit in the brain has been linked to the auditory hallucinations, delusions and other psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia. The disease is a chronic, devastating brain disorder that affects about 1 percent of Americans and causes them to struggle with a variety of problems, including thinking, learning and memory.

The disrupted circuit identified in this study solves the mystery of how current antipsychotic drugs ease symptoms and provides a new focus for efforts to develop medications that quiet "voices" but cause fewer side effects.

"We think that reducing the flow of information between these two brain structures that play a central role in processing auditory information sets the stage for stress or other factors to come along and trigger the 'voices' that are the most common psychotic symptom of schizophrenia," said the study's corresponding author Stanislav Zakharenko, M.D., Ph.D., an associate member of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology. "These findings also integrate several competing models regarding changes in the brain that lead to this complex disorder."

The work was done in a mouse model of the human genetic disorder 22q11 deletion syndrome. The syndrome occurs when part of chromosome 22 is deleted and individuals are left with one rather than the usual two copies of about 25 genes. About 30 percent of individuals with the deletion syndrome develop schizophrenia, making it one of the strongest risk factors for the disorder. DNA is the blueprint for life. Human DNA is organized into 23 pairs of chromosomes that are found in nearly every cell.

Earlier work from Zakharenko's laboratory linked one of the lost genes, Dgcr8, to brain changes in mice with the deletion syndrome that affect a structure important for learning and memory. They found evidence that the same mechanism was at work in patients with schizophrenia. Dgcr8 carries instructions for making small molecules called microRNAs that help regulate production of different proteins.

For this study, researchers used state-of-the-art tools to link the loss of Dgcr8 to changes that affect a different brain structure, the auditory thalamus. For decades antipsychotic drugs have been known to work by binding to a protein named the D2 dopamine receptor (Drd2). The binding blocks activity of the chemical messenger dopamine. Until now, however, how that quieted the "voices" of schizophrenia was unclear.

Working in mice with and without the 22q11 deletion, researchers showed that the strength of the nerve impulse from neurons in the auditory thalamus was reduced in mice with the deletion compared to normal mice. Electrical activity in other brain regions was not different.

Investigators showed that Drd2 levels were elevated in the auditory thalamus of mice with the deletion, but not in other brain regions. When researchers checked Drd2 levels in tissue from the same structure collected from 26 individuals with and without schizophrenia, scientists reported that protein levels were higher in patients with the disease.

As further evidence of Drd2's role in disrupting signals from the auditory thalamus, researchers tested neurons in the laboratory from different brain regions of mutant and normal mice by adding antipsychotic drugs haloperidol and clozapine. Those drugs work by targeting Drd2. Originally nerve impulses in the mutant neurons were reduced compared to normal mice. But the nerve impulses were almost universally enhanced by antipsychotics in neurons from mutant mice, but only in neurons from the auditory thalamus.

When researchers looked more closely at the missing 22q11 genes, they found that mice that lacked the Dgcr8 responded to a loud noise in a similar manner as schizophrenia patients. Treatment with haloperidol restored the normal startle response in the mice, just as the drug does in patients.

Studying schizophrenia and other brain disorders advances understanding of normal brain development and the missteps that lead to various catastrophic diseases, including pediatric brain tumors and other problems.

The study's first author is Sungkun Chun, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Zakharenko's laboratory. The other authors are Joby Westmoreland, Ildar Bayazitov, Donnie Eddins, Amar Pani, Richard Smeyne, Jing Yu and Jay Blundon, all of St. Jude.

The research was funded in part by grants (MH097742, MH095810, DC012833) from the National Institutes of Health and ALSAC.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
S. Chun, J. J. Westmoreland, I. T. Bayazitov, D. Eddins, A. K. Pani, R. J. Smeyne, J. Yu, J. A. Blundon, S. S. Zakharenko. (2014). Specific disruption of thalamic inputs to the auditory cortex in schizophrenia models. Science; 344(6188): 1178-1182. DOI: 10.1126/science.1253895

Here is the abstract from Science - the article itself is behind the usual pay wall.

Specific disruption of thalamic inputs to the auditory cortex in schizophrenia models

Sungkun Chun, Joby J. Westmoreland, Ildar T. Bayazitov, Donnie Eddins, Amar K. Pani, Richard J. Smeyne, Jing Yu, Jay A. Blundon, Stanislav S. Zakharenko

ABSTRACT

Auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia are alleviated by antipsychotic agents that inhibit D2 dopamine receptors (Drd2s). The defective neural circuits and mechanisms of their sensitivity to antipsychotics are unknown. We identified a specific disruption of synaptic transmission at thalamocortical glutamatergic projections in the auditory cortex in murine models of schizophrenia-associated 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS). This deficit is caused by an aberrant elevation of Drd2 in the thalamus, which renders 22q11DS thalamocortical projections sensitive to antipsychotics and causes a deficient acoustic startle response similar to that observed in schizophrenic patients. Haploinsufficiency of the microRNA-processing gene Dgcr8 is responsible for the Drd2 elevation and hypersensitivity of auditory thalamocortical projections to antipsychotics. This suggests that Dgcr8-microRNA-Drd2–dependent thalamocortical disruption is a pathogenic event underlying schizophrenia-associated psychosis.

Editor's Summary

Genes, synapses, and hallucinations

In a schizophrenia mouse model, Chun et al. found that an abnormal increase of dopamine D2 receptors in the brain's thalamic nuclei caused thalamocortical synapse deficits owing to reduced glutamate release. Antipsychotic agents or a dopamine receptor antagonist reversed this down-regulation. The defect was associated with the loss of a component of the microRNA processing machinery encoded by the dgcr8 gene.

This would appear to be a huge breakthrough for artificial intelligence, so let's get a little deeper background to understand what this means, if anything, about machine intelligence.

Here is the basic definition of the Turing test (via Wikipedia):

The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer to questions; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine's ability to render words into audio.[2]

The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words."[3] Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"[4] This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think".[5]

In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.[1][6]

And here is a little more, including some criticisms:

Weaknesses of the test

Turing did not explicitly state that the Turing test could be used as a measure of intelligence, or any other human quality. He wanted to provide a clear and understandable alternative to the word "think", which he could then use to reply to criticisms of the possibility of "thinking machines" and to suggest ways that research might move forward.

Nevertheless, the Turing test has been proposed as a measure of a machine's "ability to think" or its "intelligence". This proposal has received criticism from both philosophers and computer scientists. It assumes that an interrogator can determine if a machine is "thinking" by comparing its behavior with human behavior. Every element of this assumption has been questioned: the reliability of the interrogator's judgement, the value of comparing only behavior and the value of comparing the machine with a human. Because of these and other considerations, some AI researchers have questioned the relevance of the test to their field.

Human intelligence vs intelligence in general 

The Turing test does not directly test whether the computer behaves intelligently - it tests only whether the computer behaves like a human being. Since human behavior and intelligent behavior are not exactly the same thing, the test can fail to accurately measure intelligence in two ways:

Some human behavior is unintelligent

The Turing test requires that the machine be able to execute all human behaviors, regardless of whether they are intelligent. It even tests for behaviors that we may not consider intelligent at all, such as the susceptibility to insults,[70] the temptation to lie or, simply, a high frequency of typing mistakes. If a machine cannot imitate these unintelligent behaviors in detail it fails the test. This objection was raised by The Economist, in an article entitled "Artificial Stupidity" published shortly after the first Loebner prize competition in 1992. The article noted that the first Loebner winner's victory was due, at least in part, to its ability to "imitate human typing errors."[39] Turing himself had suggested that programs add errors into their output, so as to be better "players" of the game.[71]

Some intelligent behavior is inhuman

The Turing test does not test for highly intelligent behaviors, such as the ability to solve difficult problems or come up with original insights. In fact, it specifically requires deception on the part of the machine: if the machine is more intelligent than a human being it must deliberately avoid appearing too intelligent. If it were to solve a computational problem that is practically impossible for a human to solve, then the interrogator would know the program is not human, and the machine would fail the test. Because it cannot measure intelligence that is beyond the ability of humans, the test cannot be used in order to build or evaluate systems that are more intelligent than humans. Because of this, several test alternatives that would be able to evaluate super-intelligent systems have been proposed.[72]

Real intelligence vs simulated intelligence
See also: Synthetic intelligence

The Turing test is concerned strictly with how the subject acts — the external behaviour of the machine. In this regard, it takes a behaviourist or functionalist approach to the study of intelligence. The example of ELIZA suggests that a machine passing the test may be able to simulate human conversational behavior by following a simple (but large) list of mechanical rules, without thinking or having a mind at all.

John Searle has argued that external behavior cannot be used to determine if a machine is "actually" thinking or merely "simulating thinking."[33] His Chinese room argument is intended to show that, even if the Turing test is a good operational definition of intelligence, it may not indicate that the machine has a mind, consciousness, or intentionality. (Intentionality is a philosophical term for the power of thoughts to be "about" something.)

Turing anticipated this line of criticism in his original paper,[73] writing:

I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper.[74]

Naivete of interrogators and the anthropomorphic fallacy

In practice, the test's results can easily be dominated not by the computer's intelligence, but by the attitudes, skill or naivete of the questioner.

Turing does not specify the precise skills and knowledge required by the interrogator in his description of the test, but he did use the term "average interrogator": "[the] average interrogator would not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning".[44]

Shah & Warwick (2009b) show that experts are fooled, and that interrogator strategy, "power" vs "solidarity" affects correct identification, the latter being more successful.

Chatterbot programs such as ELIZA have repeatedly fooled unsuspecting people into believing that they are communicating with human beings. In these cases, the "interrogator" is not even aware of the possibility that they are interacting with a computer. To successfully appear human, there is no need for the machine to have any intelligence whatsoever and only a superficial resemblance to human behaviour is required.

Early Loebner prize competitions used "unsophisticated" interrogators who were easily fooled by the machines.[40] Since 2004, the Loebner Prize organizers have deployed philosophers, computer scientists, and journalists among the interrogators. Nonetheless, some of these experts have been deceived by the machines.[75]

Michael Shermer points out that human beings consistently choose to consider non-human objects as human whenever they are allowed the chance, a mistake called the anthropomorphic fallacy: They talk to their cars, ascribe desire and intentions to natural forces (e.g., "nature abhors a vacuum"), and worship the sun as a human-like being with intelligence. If the Turing test is applied to religious objects, Shermer argues, then, that inanimate statues, rocks, and places have consistently passed the test throughout history.[citation needed] This human tendency towards anthropomorphism effectively lowers the bar for the Turing test, unless interrogators are specifically trained to avoid it.

With that background, you can make sense of this new study as fits your worldview.

In my worldview, this does not mean much about computer intelligence. It does advance the foundation for future research.

Computer passes 'Turing Test' for the first time after convincing users it is human

A "super computer" has duped humans into thinking it is a 13-year-old boy, becoming the first machine to pass the "iconic" Turing Test, experts say

By Hannah Furness
08 Jun 2014

Alan Turing Photo: AFP

A ''super computer'' has duped humans into thinking it is a 13-year-old boy to become the first machine to pass the ''iconic'' Turing Test, experts have said.

Five machines were tested at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations.

The test was devised in 1950 by computer science pioneer and Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing, who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human, then it was ''thinking''.

No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading said.

But ''Eugene Goostman'', a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, the university said.

Related Articles

• Turing Institute announced in Budget 19 Mar 2014
• 'Royal pardon is long overdue' 24 Dec 2013
• Will Alice pass the Turing Test? 28 Feb 2002
• Computers still not quite clever enough to fool humans, Turing Test shows 12 Oct 2008
• How long before robots can think like us? 21 Aug 2012

Professor Kevin Warwick, from the University of Reading, said: ''In the field of artificial intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test.

''It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting.''

The successful machine was created by Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, who lives in the United States, and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko who lives in Russia.

Mr Veselov said: ''It's a remarkable achievement for us and we hope it boosts interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots.''

Prof Warwick said there had been previous claims that the test was passed in similar competitions around the world.

''A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations,'' he said.

''We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's test was passed for the first time.''

Prof Warwick said having a computer with such artificial intelligence had ''implications for society'' and would serve as a ''wake-up call to cybercrime''.

The event on Saturday was poignant as it took place on the 60th anniversary of the death of Dr Turing, who laid the foundations of modern computing.

During the Second World War, his critical work at Britain's code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park helped shorten the conflict and save many thousands of lives.

Instead of being hailed a hero, Dr Turing was persecuted for his homosexuality. After his conviction in 1952 for gross indecency with a 19-year-old Manchester man, he was chemically castrated.

Two years later, he died from cyanide poisoning in an apparent suicide, though there have been suggestions that his death was an accident.

Last December, after a long campaign, Dr Turing was given a posthumous Royal Pardon.

Proof of Precognition or Statistical Manipulation?

In 2011, a widely publicized study by Daryl Bem claimed evidence of precognition (Bem, 2011). The article was widely reported in the popular press, but widely dismissed in the scientific research world due to questions about the statistical approach applied in testing these effects (Bem et al., 2011; Rouder and Morey, 2011; Wagenmakers et al., 2011).

A series of attempts to replicate the findings ensued, most of which (especially those conducted by researchers skeptical of precognition) have failed (Galak et al., 2012; Ritchie et al., 2012; Wagenmakers et al., 2012).

Over the last two years, two articles in Frontiers in Psychology and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience reported a meta-analysis of experiments on “predictive anticipatory activity” or “presentiment” (Mossbridge et al., 2012, 2014).

In that paradigm participants are exposed to a series of random stimuli, some arousing (violent/erotic images, loud sounds), others calm controls (neutral images, silence). Apparently, physiological responses evoked by the two trial types prior to stimulus onset predict the upcoming stimulus.

It's easy to get caught up in the possibilities of a reality where this were the case - the second law of thermodynamics would no longer be an absolute law, and if these claims were true, one must be prepared to accept the existence of perpetual motion and time travel.

But the data and the statistical manipulations are not supportive - at this point - of the conclusion of precognition. In this opinion article from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, D. Samuel Schwarzkopf outlines some steps that should be met before one accepts precognition as a real phenomenon.

Full Citation: 
Schwarzkopf, DS. (2014, May 27). We should have seen this coming. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; 8:332. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00332

We should have seen this coming

D. Samuel Schwarzkopf

• Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK

The possibility of precognition has fascinated humanity since ancient times making it a recurring theme in fiction and mythology. It has also been a topic for scientific investigation. While the majority of such parapsychological studies have been ignored by the larger scientific community, several recent studies of purported precognitive phenomena were published by major international psychology journals. A widely publicized study by Daryl Bem claimed to have found evidence of precognition (Bem, 2011). In its wake have been discussions about the appropriate statistical approach for testing these effects (Bem et al., 2011; Rouder and Morey, 2011; Wagenmakers et al., 2011), and it caused a wave of replication attempts most of which, at least those conducted by researchers skeptical of precognition, have failed (Galak et al., 2012; Ritchie et al., 2012; Wagenmakers et al., 2012). More recently, two articles in Frontiers in Psychology and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience reported a meta-analysis of experiments on “predictive anticipatory activity” or “presentiment” (Mossbridge et al., 2012, 2014). In that paradigm participants are exposed to a series of random stimuli, some arousing (violent/erotic images, loud sounds), others calm controls (neutral images, silence). Apparently, physiological responses evoked by the two trial types prior to stimulus onset predict the upcoming stimulus.

Such findings of “psi” effects fuel the imagination and most people probably agree that there are things that current scientific knowledge cannot explain. However, the seismic nature of these claims cannot be overstated: future events influencing the past breaks the second law of thermodynamics. If one accepts these claims to be true, one should also be prepared to accept the existence of perpetual motion and time travel. It also completely undermines over a century of experimental research based on the assumption that causes precede effects. Differences in pre-stimulus activity would invalidate baseline correction procedures fundamental to many different types of data analysis. While the meta-analysis briefly discusses this implication (Mossbridge et al., 2012), the authors are seemingly unaware of the far-reaching consequences of their claims: they effectively invalidate most of the neuroscience and psychology literature, from electrophysiology and neuroimaging to temporal effects found in psychophysical research. Thus, it seems justified to ask for extraordinary evidence to support claims of this magnitude (Truzzi, 1978; Sagan, 1995).

But what constitutes extraordinary evidence? The results of this and other similar meta-analyses on psi effects are highly significant under commonly used inferential statistics and in many cases also strongly supported by Bayesian inference. Applying the standards accepted by the larger scientific community, should this not suffice to convince us that precognition/presentiment are real?

To me this interpretation betrays a deep-seated misapprehension of the scientific method. Statistical inference, regardless of whatever form it takes, only assigns probabilities. It cannot ever prove or disprove a theory. In fact, unlike mathematical theorems, scientific theories are never proven. They can only be supported by evidence and must always be subjected to scientific skepticism. The presentiment meta-analysis (Mossbridge et al., 2012, 2014) illustrates how this process can be misapplied. A significant effect does not confirm psi but it raises many new questions.

First, any meta-analysis can only be as good as the primary studies it analyzes. Several of the studies included are of questionable quality, e.g., the fMRI experiment (Bierman and Scholte, 2002) commits major errors with multiple comparison correction and circular inference (Kriegeskorte et al., 2009; Vul et al., 2009) and has such poor presentation that it is unlikely it would have been accepted for publication in any major neuroimaging journal. Moreover, many studies were in fact published in conference proceedings and did not pass formal peer review. Admittedly, the authors go to some lengths to assess the quality of each study but it is unclear how appropriate those quality scores were. In fact the rationale for the formula used to combine the different measures is debatable. A more detailed breakdown of how these different parameters influence the results would have been far more interesting. Does the type of random number generator used, or whether a study was peer reviewed, make any difference to the results? Related to this, additional factors would have been of importance, such as whether the experimenters expected to find a presentiment effect (see also: Galak et al., 2012).

Second, the meta-analysis should be much broader including myriad studies not conducted by psi researchers that used similar designs. While the authors tested for potential publication bias (the possibility that many null-results that would have made the results non-significant are missing from the database), there must be a large number of data sets from similar protocols in the wider literature, in particular in emotion research, whose inclusion would greatly enhance the power of this analysis. An often used argument, that these studies are invalid because they used counterbalanced designs and are thus confounded by expectation bias, is a straw man and also rather ironic given the topic of investigation: unless participants knew in advance that stimuli were counterbalanced this could not possibly change their expectations.

Third, a particular critical factor that should have been analyzed directly is the imbalance between control (calm) and target (arousing) trials typically used in these studies. While the authors themselves acknowledge that this is usually approximately 2:1 (Mossbridge et al., 2012), this is neglected by the meta-analysis and seemingly most primary studies even though such an imbalance means that an attentive participant will quickly learn statistical properties of the sequence and thus affects how the brain responds to the different stimulus classes. Rather than predicting future events, what such pre-stimulus physiological activity may actually reflect is that the brain can make predictions of probable events. One important factor to be included in the meta-analysis therefore should have been whether the ratio of target and control trials affects the magnitude of these pre-stimulus effects.

Fourth, could these effects be at least partially explained by analytical artifacts? In many of these studies (Bierman and Scholte, 2002; Radin, 2004) the data are not only baseline corrected to the mean activity level prior to stimulus onset, but they are further “clamped” to a particular time point prior to the stimulus. This should not necessarily influence the results if this point is a true baseline. However, if this pre-stimulus period is still affected by the response to the previous stimulus (e.g., the signal could decay back to baseline more slowly after an arousing than a calm trial) such a correction would inadvertently introduce artifacts in the pre-stimulus period. As such it may also be a much greater problem for slow than fast physiological measures. Either way, it would have been another factor worthy of attention in the meta-analysis.

Fifth, the effect of expectation and trial order must be tested explicitly. Many of these studies test for the presence of expectation bias by correlating the presentiment effect with the time between target events (Mossbridge et al., 2012). The rationale is that expectation bias increases with the number of control trials—a gambler's fallacy. Therefore, so the reasoning goes, the pre-stimulus activity should also increase. However, this is based on an unproven assumption that these physiological effects scale linearly with expectation. Further, because the probability of sequences of control trials falls off exponentially with their length, the presentiment effect cannot be estimated with the same reliability for long sequences as for short ones. This means that even if a linear relationship exists, the power to detect it is low as the presentiment response is subject to variability. Critically, this analysis cannot possibly detect whether participants learn statistical regularities in the trial sequence. The best approach to understand the role of trial order and expectation would be to design experiments that directly test these factors. Order effects are quantified by exposing participants to different stimulus pairs. Expectation bias can be manipulated by cuing participants to the probability that the upcoming trial is a target. If the predictive activity were similar to the presentiment effect when participants strongly expect a target trial, this would indicate that it may in fact be an expectation effect. Crucially, does presentiment persist when participants do not expect a target even when the next trial is one?

Lastly, are the purported effects even biologically plausible? These studies employ vastly different measurements from skin conductance and electrophysiology to hemodynamic responses. Under conventional knowledge these are assumed to be caused by preceding neural events, e.g., a typical hemodynamic response peaks ~6 s after a neural event (Boynton et al., 1996). Conversely, electrophysiological measures have a latency of fractions of a second, while skin conductance measures, heart rates, pupil dilation etc. probably fall somewhere in between. Thus, the same precognitive neural event probably cannot cause all of these responses. Alternatively, if these responses themselves reverse the arrow of time and are caused by future stimuli, this will require a complete overhaul of current theory. Why should blood oxygenation increase before neural activity in such a way that predicts the up-coming stimulus?

In my mind, only if all these points were addressed appropriately, should one even entertain the thought that such presentiment effects have been empirically demonstrated. The first four could have certainly formed part of the meta-analysis; it is frankly a clear failure of the peer review process that they were not. The final two points should at the very least be discussed as critical further steps before assuming that the effects reverse causality.

Much of parapsychology research is concerned with proving that psi is real (Alcock, 2003), that is, it rests on the notion that “there is an anomalous effect in need of an explanation” (Utts, 1991). But there is always unexplained variance in any data regardless of how significant the results are. It is the purpose of scientific investigation to explain as much as possible, not to conclude that there remains something we do not currently understand. Science works by formulating falsifiable hypotheses and testing them. This in turn will produce new findings that can be used to generate better theories. Further, one should always start from the most parsimonious explanation for a result. Only if a more complex model has greater explanatory power should we stray from the one requiring the least assumptions (Figure 1). Since the psi hypothesis merely postulates that some results remain unexplained, it does not lead to any falsifiable hypothesis that could help explain these effects. Post-hoc speculations of quantum biology or psychokinesis are insufficient unless they can make testable predictions and they are hardly the most parsimonious explanations.

FIGURE 1

Figure 1. Simplistic schematic of the heliocentric model (left) and the geocentric model (right). The motion of the Sun (yellow) and the planets Earth (blue) and Venus (orange) is shown. Under the heliocentric model both Earth and Venus have simple circular orbits around the Sun. In contrast, under the geocentric model Venus describes a complicated (albeit beautiful) path. The heliocentric model is by far the more parsimonious explanation for our observation of the motions of celestial bodies, especially when taking Newtonian physics into account. It is important to note that this heliocentric model is not the “true” model as for instance the orbits are not circular and the planets do not strictly revolve around the center of the sun. However, it is certainly the better model of the two as it requires fewer assumptions.

Certainly, science should be open-minded and no hypothesis must be dismissed out of hand—but this does not mean that every possible hypothesis is equally likely. A former colleague of mine once wrote very eloquently: “Science is not about finding the truth at all, but about finding better ways of being wrong” (Schofield, 2013). Not only does our present understanding fail to explain everything about the universe, we must accept that we will never explain everything. Importantly, this also means that we must always remain skeptical of any claims but especially our own.

It would be an easy mistake for “mainstream” researchers to accuse parapsychologists of being solely responsible for perpetuating this non-skeptical thinking. Yet it is only human to cling to theories against compelling evidence to the contrary. We all must be more critical. As Richard Feynman put it: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool” (Feynman, 2010). If some result is too good to be true, it probably is. We should actively strive for our hypotheses to be proven incorrect. And we should stop relying on statistics at the expense of objective reasoning. If we do not, I predict we will see many more such studies (on psi or something else) published in major science journals. They will not bring us any closer to understanding the cosmos.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this article to two individuals whose words have greatly inspired my thinking: Carl Sagan (1934–1996) and my colleague Tom Schofield (1976–2010). The author is supported by a ERC Starting Grant.

References available at the Frontiers site.

Sub-Clinical Narcissists CAN Feel Empathy, If They Can Take the Other's Perspective

This research was widely reported in the media last week, but this article from The Atlantic offers the most balanced report of the study of those I have read.

Okay, an important note, made below, is in order. The subjects of this study were only assessed for narcissistic traits, not for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The results here should not be extrapolated to individuals with NPD.

The upshot is that your everyday, garden variety, pain-in-the-ass with narcissistic tendencies or traits can feel empathy for another person if asked to take that person's perspective. This means some of those around us who are not fully narcissistic can change. But it also means that we can teach children to be empathetic when they are still quite young and are, by nature, little narcissists.

How to Make the Narcissist in Your Life a Little Nicer

A new study finds that deliberately considering the perspectives of others can help conceited people feel empathy.

Olga Khazan | Jun 3 2014


Caravaggio/Wikimedia Commons/Atlantic
Love is great, but it’s actually empathy that makes the world go ‘round. Understanding other peoples’ viewpoints is so essential to human functioning that psychologists sometimes refer to empathy as “social glue, binding people together and creating harmonious relationships.”

Narcissists tend to lack this ability. Think of the charismatic co-worker who refuses to cover for a colleague who’s been in a car accident. Or the affable friend who nonetheless seems to delight in back-stabbing.

These types of individuals are what’s known as “sub-clinical” narcissists—the everyday egoists who, though they may not merit psychiatric attention, don’t make very good friends or lovers. "They tend to cheat on their partners and their relationships break up sooner and end quite messily."

“If people are in a romantic relationship with a narcissist, they tend to cheat on their partners and their relationships break up sooner and end quite messily,” Erica Hepper, a psychologist at the University of Surrey in the U.K., told me. “They tend to be more deviant academically. They take credit for other peoples' work.”

Psychologists have long thought that narcissists were largely incorrigible—that there was nothing we could do to help them be more empathetic. But for a new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Hepper discovered a way to measurably help narcissists feel the pain of others.

First, she gathered up 282 online volunteers who hailed from various countries but were mostly young and female. They took a 41-question personality quiz designed to assess their levels of subclinical narcissism, checking boxes next to statements like “I like to have authority over other people” or “I will be a success.” They then read a story about a person named Chris who had just gone through a breakup, and then took another quiz to determine how bad they felt for Chris. The more narcissistic among them were indeed less likely to feel empathy for the fictional jilted man.

An important note here: The study participants, though they’re described as “narcissists,” were not clinically diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a bona-fide mental illness. Psychologists aren’t sure how much overlap there is between functional people who are very narcissistic and those who suffer from NPD. One rule of thumb, Hepper tells me, is that most ordinary narcissists are happy, while NPD tends to lead its sufferers to extreme dissatisfaction with life.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

For her next manipulation, Hepper and her co-authors asked a group of 95 female undergrads to take the same narcissism quiz, and then later to watch a 10-minute documentary about Susan, a victim of spousal abuse. Half were told to try to put themselves in Susan’s shoes (“Imagine how Susan feels. Try to take her perspective in the video...”), while the others were told to imagine they were watching the program on TV one evening.

The subjects who were told to take Susan’s perspective were significantly more likely to score higher on empathy. In fact, the more narcissistic they were, the more the trick seemed to work.

“I think what's going on here is that people who are low on narcissism are already responding to people—telling them what to do isn't going to increase their empathy any further,” Hepper said. “But the higher on narcissism you get, the less empathy [you feel]. By instructing them to think about it, it activates this empathic response that was previously much weaker.”

And the narcissists weren’t just faking it. In a third experiment, Hepper showed that extreme narcissists had lower-than-average heart rates when listening to a recording of a woman in distress. (That is, “Their lack of empathy is more than skin-deep,” Hepper writes.) But if they were told to take the woman’s perspective, their heart rates leapt back up to a normal level.

Hepper thinks that eventually, this research could help shape therapeutic interventions aimed at narcissists. Teachers or human resources representatives could use such tools to try to get their resident egomaniacs to be more charitable.

Perhaps one day we can banish all the world’s narcissists to a desert island littered with tanning beds and TV cameras. Until that day, this type of compassion training might be the best weapon we have against the self-absorbed. As Hepper said, maybe it can help make the world “a nicer, more prosocial place.”

Michael Bond - How Extreme Isolation Warps the Mind

Michael Bond is the author of The Power of Others: Peer Pressure, Groupthink, and How the People Around Us Shape Everything We Do (2014). This article from the BBC is adapted from his book.

If you have ever tried a sensory deprivation tank, you have a glimpse of what isolation (from everything, including vision, sound, scent, taste, and touch) can do to the mind. In my first college stint, one of my housemates in Ashland (OR) had a sensory deprivation tank she used with massage clients. I spent as much time as possible in that tank, up to 3-4 hours, and once on a low-dose of LSD (about 100 mcgs). As much as anything else I have done in my life, including meditation and therapy, getting to know my own mind without any outside input began a process of change (and curisoity) in me that continues today. If it were feasible, I'd buy a tank.

This article looks at isolation in a bigger sense, however, including prisoners in solitary confinement and those who have participated in research that removes them from circadian rhythms of light and dark.

This is a fascinating article, so take a few minutes to check it out, then go see the other cool stuff that the BBC Future has made available (finally) to web users in the States.

How Extreme Isolation Warps the Mind

When people are isolated from human contact, their mind can do some truly bizarre things, says Michael Bond. Why does this happen?

Michael Bond | 14 May 2014

(Getty Images)

Sarah Shourd’s mind began to slip after about two months into her incarceration. She heard phantom footsteps and flashing lights, and spent most of her day crouched on all fours, listening through a gap in the door.

That summer, the 32-year-old had been hiking with two friends in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan when they were arrested by Iranian troops after straying onto the border with Iran. Accused of spying, they were kept in solitary confinement in Evin prison in Tehran, each in their own tiny cell. She endured almost 10,000 hours with little human contact before she was freed. One of the most disturbing effects was the hallucinations.

“In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my head around to find that nothing was there,” she wrote in the New York Times in 2011. “At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realised the screams were my own.”

We all want to be alone from time to time, to escape the demands of our colleagues or the hassle of crowds. But not alone alone. For most people, prolonged social isolation is all bad, particularly mentally. We know this not only from reports by people like Shourd who have experienced it first-hand, but also from psychological experiments on the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation, some of which had to be called off due to the extreme and bizarre reactions of those involved. Why does the mind unravel so spectacularly when we’re truly on our own, and is there any way to stop it?

Inside prison walls, solitude can play disturbing tricks on the mind (Flickr/Cyri)

We’ve known for a while that isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and are also more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Loneliness also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation unleashes an extreme immune response – a cascade of stress hormones and inflammation. This may have been appropriate in our early ancestors, when being isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for us the outcome is mostly harmful.

Yet some of the most profound effects of loneliness are on the mind. For starters, isolation messes with our sense of time. One of the strangest effects is the ‘time-shifting’ reported by those who have spent long periods living underground without daylight. In 1961, French geologist Michel Siffre led a two-week expedition to study an underground glacier beneath the French Alps and ended up staying two months, fascinated by how the darkness affected human biology. He decided to abandon his watch and “live like an animal”. While conducting tests with his team on the surface, they discovered it took him five minutes to count to what he thought was 120 seconds.

A similar pattern of ‘slowing time’ was reported by Maurizio Montalbini, a sociologist and caving enthusiast. In 1993, Montalbini spent 366 days in an underground cavern near Pesaro in Italy that had been designed with Nasa to simulate space missions, breaking his own world record for time spent underground. When he emerged, he was convinced only 219 days had passed. His sleep-wake cycles had almost doubled in length. Since then, researchers have found that in darkness most people eventually adjust to a 48-hour cycle: 36 hours of activity followed by 12 hours of sleep. The reasons are still unclear.

After emerging from a nine week stint in underground darkness, Michel Siffre needed to wear a blindfold to protect his eyes (Getty Images)

As well as their time-shifts, Siffre and Montalbini reported periods of mental instability too. But these experiences were nothing compared with the extreme reactions seen in notorious sensory deprivation experiments in the mid-20th Century.

In the 1950s and 1960s, China was rumoured to be using solitary confinement to “brainwash” American prisoners captured during the Korean War, and the US and Canadian governments were all too keen to try it out. Their defence departments funded a series of research programmes that might be considered ethically dubious today.

The most extensive took place at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal, led by the psychologist Donald Hebb. The McGill researchers invited paid volunteers – mainly college students – to spend days or weeks by themselves in sound-proof cubicles, deprived of meaningful human contact. Their aim was to reduce perceptual stimulation to a minimum, to see how their subjects would behave when almost nothing was happening. They minimised what they could feel, see, hear and touch, fitting them with translucent visors, cotton gloves and cardboard cuffs extending beyond the fingertips. As Scientific American magazine reported at the time, they had them lie on U-shaped foam pillows to restrict noise, and set up a continuous hum of air-conditioning units to mask small sounds.

After only a few hours, the students became acutely restless. They started to crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word association tests.

Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations - sometimes starting with geometric shapes or points of light, and then getting stranger... (Akuei/Flickr)

But the most alarming effects were the hallucinations. They would start with points of light, lines or shapes, eventually evolving into bizarre scenes, such as squirrels marching with sacks over their shoulders or processions of eyeglasses filing down a street. They had no control over what they saw: one man saw only dogs; another, babies.

Some of them experienced sound hallucinations as well: a music box or a choir, for instance. Others imagined sensations of touch: one man had the sense he had been hit in the arm by pellets fired from guns. Another, reaching out to touch a doorknob, felt an electric shock.

When they emerged from the experiment they found it hard to shake this altered sense of reality, convinced that the whole room was in motion, or that objects were constantly changing shape and size.

Distressing end

The researchers had hoped to observe their subjects over several weeks, but the trial was cut short because they became too distressed to carry on. Few lasted beyond two days, and none as long as a week. Afterwards, Hebb wrote in the journal American Psychologist that the results were “very unsettling to us… It is one thing to hear that the Chinese are brainwashing their prisoners on the other side of the world; it is another to find, in your own laboratory, that merely taking away the usual sights, sounds, and bodily contacts from a healthy university student for a few days can shake him, right down to the base.”

In 2008, clinical psychologist Ian Robbins recreated Hebb’s experiment in collaboration with the BBC, isolating six volunteers for 48 hours in sound-proofed rooms in a former nuclear bunker. The results were similar. The volunteers suffered anxiety, extreme emotions, paranoia and significant deterioration in their mental functioning. They also hallucinated: a heap of 5,000 empty oyster shells; a snake; zebras; tiny cars; the room taking off; mosquitoes; fighter planes buzzing around.

A clip from BBC Horizon’s Total Isolation experiment – read more information about the programme here.

Why does the perceptually deprived brain play such tricks? Cognitive psychologists believe that the part of the brain that deals with ongoing tasks, such as sensory perception, is accustomed to dealing with a large quantity of information, such as visual, auditory and other environmental cues. But when there is a dearth of information, says Robbins, “the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain’s central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn’t make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern.” It creates whole images out of partial ones. In other words, it tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

Such mental failures should perhaps not surprise us. For one thing, we know that other primates do not fare well in isolation. One of the most graphic examples is psychologist Harry Harlow’s experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the 1960s, in which he deprived them of social contact after birth for months or years. They became, he observed, “enormously disturbed” even after 30 days, and after a year were “obliterated” socially, incapable of interaction of any kind. (A comparable social fracturing has been observed in humans: consider the children rescued from Romanian orphanages in the early 1990s, who after being almost entirely deprived of close social contact since birth grew up with serious behavioural and attachment issues.)

We may crave solitude occasionally, but in the long term it's not good for us physically or mentally (Getty Images)

Secondly, we derive meaning from our emotional states largely through contact with others. Biologists believe that human emotions evolved because they aided co-operation among our early ancestors who benefited from living in groups. Their primary function is social. With no one to mediate our feelings of fear, anger, anxiety and sadness and help us determine their appropriateness, before long they deliver us a distorted sense of self, a perceptual fracturing or a profound irrationality. It seems that left too much to ourselves, the very system that regulates our social living can overwhelm us.

Take the 25,000 inmates held in “super-maximum security” prisons in the US today. Without social interaction, supermax prisoners have no way to test the appropriateness of their emotions or their fantastical thinking, says Terry Kupers, a forensic psychiatrist at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, who has interviewed thousands of supermax prisoners. This is one of the reasons many suffer anxiety, paranoia and obsessive thoughts. Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a leading authority on the mental health of inmates in the US, believes that some of them purposefully initiate brutal confrontations with prison staff just to reaffirm their own existence – to remember who they are.

Coping strategy

Social isolation is not always debilitating, however. Are some better than others at coping? And can you train yourself to resist the worst effects? Here scientists have fewer hard answers, but we can at least look to the lessons of individuals who thrived – or floundered – under isolation.

When Shourd was imprisoned in Iran, she was arguably among the least-equipped people to cope, because her incarceration came out of the blue. People in her circumstances have their world suddenly inverted, and there is nothing in the manner of their taking – no narrative of sacrifice, or enduring for a greater good – to help them derive meaning from it. They must somehow find meaning in their predicament – or mentally detach themselves from their day-to-day reality, which is a monumental task when alone.

Hussain Al-Shahristani managed it. He was Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear adviser before he was tortured and shut away in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad after refusing on moral grounds to cooperate on the development of an atomic weapon. He kept his sanity during 10 years of solitary confinement by taking refuge in a world of abstractions, making up mathematical problems which he then tried to solve. He is now deputy energy minister of Iraq. Edith Bone, a medical academic and translator, followed a similar strategy during the seven years she spent imprisoned by the Hungarian communist government after World War Two, constructing an abacus out of stale bread and counting out an inventory of her vocabulary in the six languages she spoke fluently.

Some believe a military background may help prevent the worst effects of isolation (Thinkstock)

Such experiences may be easier to take if you belong to a military organisation. Keron Fletcher, a consultant psychiatrist who has helped debrief and treat hostages, says mock detention and interrogation exercises of the kind he himself underwent while serving with the Royal Air Force are a good preparation for the shock of capture. “They teach you the basics of coping,” he says. “Also, you know your buddies will be busting a gut to get you back in one piece. I think the military are less likely to feel helpless or hopeless. Hopelessness and helplessness are horrible things to live with and they erode morale and coping ability.”

US senator John McCain is a good example of how a military mindset bestows psychological advantages. His five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, during which he refused to yield to his interrogators, actually seemed to strengthen him. Though note what he had to say about the two years he spent in isolation: “It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment… The onset of despair is immediate, and it is a formidable foe.”

Extreme reality

Psychologists who study how people cope with isolation have learnt much from solo explorers and mountaineers. For many adventurers deprived of human company – albeit voluntarily – the landscape itself can serve as an effective surrogate, drawing them out of themselves into the beauty or grandeur of their surroundings. Norwegian psychologist Gro Sandal at the University of Bergen in Norway, who has interviewed many adventurers about how they cope in extreme environments, says that transcending the reality of their situation in this way is a common coping mechanism. “It makes them feel safer. It makes them feel less alone.”

A similar psychological mechanism could explain why shipwrecked mariners marooned on islands have been known to anthropomorphise inanimate objects, in some cases creating a cabal of imaginary companions with whom to share the solitude. It sounds like madness but is likely a foil against it. Take the way sailor Ellen MacArthur nicknamed her trimaran “Mobi”, during her record-breaking solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2005. During the voyage she signed emails to her support team “love e and mobi”, and in her published account uses “we” rather than “I”.

Sailors have been known to combat the loneliness of the ocean by anthropomorphising inanimate objects (Thinkstock)

There is no more poignant illustration of the power of solitude to sink one person while lifting up another than the stories of Bernard Moitessier and Donald Crowhurst, two of the competitors in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe round-the-world yacht race. The trophy, offered to the first sailor to complete a solo non-stop circumnavigation of the globe, was won in 313 days by Robin Knox-Johnston, the only one out of nine starters to finish. He seemed to relish being alone with his boat, but not as much as Moitessier, an ascetic Frenchman who practised yoga on deck and fed cheese to the shearwater birds that shadowed him. Moitessier found the experience so fulfilling, and the idea of returning to civilisation so distasteful, that he abandoned the race despite a good chance of victory and just kept on sailing, eventually landing in Tahiti after travelling more than halfway round the world again. “I continue non-stop because I am happy at sea,” he declared, “and perhaps because I want to save my soul.”

Crowhurst, meanwhile, was in trouble from the start. He left England ill-prepared and sent fake reports about his supposed progress through the southern seas while never actually leaving the Atlantic. Drifting aimlessly for months off the coast of South America, he became increasingly depressed and lonely, eventually retreating to his cabin and consolidating his fantasies in a rambling 25,000-word philosophical treatise before jumping overboard. His body was never found.

What message can we take from these stories of endurance and despair? The obvious one is that we are, as a rule, considerably diminished when disengaged from others. Isolation may very often be the “sum total of wretchedness”, as the writer Thomas Carlyle put it. However, a more upbeat assessment seems equally valid: it is possible to connect, to find solace beyond ourselves, even when we are alone. It helps to be prepared, and to be mentally resilient. But we shouldn’t underestimate the power of our imagination to knock over prison walls, penetrate icy caves or provide make-believe companions to walk with us.

This article is based on the book The Power of Others by Michael Bond (Oneworld Publications).