Math Problems Can Be Physically Painful

By Ian Steadman, Wired UK

How much do you hate doing sums? Long division? Fractions? Calculus?

For many people the thought of these kinds of problems is horrible. Painful, even. A study by psychologists Ian Lyon and Sian Beilock has shown that that’s not hyperbole — some people who dislike math do so because the thought of working out things with numbers is experientially similar to physical pain. For people with “high levels of mathematics-anxiety” (HMAs), maths hurts.

Lyon and Beilock, from the University of Chicago and Western University, respectively, were intrigued by other studies that had shown that some people experience social rejection in a way comparable to actual pain, and that it seems to be experienced relative to the amount of anxiety people feel. Maths, they figure, also generates a fair bit of anxiety in people: “Mathematics … anxiety is an ideal test bed for expanding our understanding of how physically innocuous situations might elicit a neural response reflective of actual physical pain,” they wrote.

The hypothesis was that the expectation of having to do maths would be the thing to generate the anxiety, which would in turn generate pain. They asked for participants to answer survey questions about how anxious maths problems made them feel, whittling it down to two samples of 14 people each — one group of HMAs, and one group of LMAs (that is, low anxiety about mathematics). The criteria for quantifying anxiety was based on the Short Math Anxiety Rating-Scale (SMARS), a scale specifically designed in 1972 for measuring how anxious people get about the idea of getting maths (and it says something about how widespread an issue this is that there’s already a psychological scale for measuring it).

The 28 people were asked a series of word and number puzzles while their brains were scanned with an MRI machine. As they lay inside the machine, a coloured light would flash up before each set of questions appeared, signalling whether it would be language or maths questions that followed, and what difficulty (either easy or hard) they would be. This was key to testing the hypothesis that it’s the expectation that triggers the unpleasant sensations, not the actual puzzles themselves.

When it came down to easier maths and word questions, there was no difference between the two groups of HMAs and LMAs. For the harder questions, though, HMAs “significantly” underperformed LMAs, which makes sense — people who are very anxious tend to perform worse at tasks that require lots of thought.

Looking at the differences in brain activity between the HMAs and LMAs when working on the harder maths questions, Lyon writes that “four regions — bilateral dorso-posterior insula, mid-cingulate cortex, and a dorsal segment of the right central sulcus — showed a significant interaction, driven by a positive relation between SMARS and math-cue-activity and a negative relation between SMARS and word-cue-activity”. For HMAs, their ability to perform harder maths problems was impacted more the greater their score on the SMARS assessment; there was no such correlation when it came to word problems. Interestingly, the correlation also only held for HMAs — for LMAs, their scores on the SMARS had a “non-significantly negative” relation to their ability to solve any of the maths problems.

The dorso-posterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex are parts of the brain that are associated with the experience of pain — the results showed that, when HMAs saw the light that corresponded to a hard maths problem, their brains anticipated the questions as a “a visceral, aversive bodily reaction”.

In the conclusion, Lyon writes: “We provide the first neural evidence indicating the nature of the subjective experience of math anxiety. Previous research on the overlap between pain processing and psychological experience of social rejection has focused primarily on the actual experience of being rejected [but] our data go beyond these results and suggest that even anticipating an unpleasant event is associated with activation of neural regions involved in pain processing.”

There are also implications for the theory that this kind of experience of pain is something inherent in humans thanks to evolution. Lyon considers it “unlikely that a purely evolutionary mechanism would drive a neural pain response elicited by the prospect of doing math (as math is a recent cultural invention)”. That means the pain pathways in the brain can be activated by things that have no relation to painful experiences — which could shed light on other psychological phenomena like phobias.

Since it’s the anticipation of mathematics that seems to get people the most, rather than the actual sums themselves, it might be worth investigating whether there’s a different way of teaching maths in schools. It could also mean taking the time to simplify the process for returning a tax return, for example. Governments often wring their hands over how many adults are effectively mathematically illiterate after leaving school, but maybe it’s not their fault they couldn’t concentrate in class. They might well have just been scared of the number seven (because, after all, seven ate nine).

Source: Wired.co.uk

Read More..

MTV to air fundraiser for devastated Jersey shore

NEW YORK (AP) — MTV, home of the “Jersey Shore” reality show, plans to air a fundraising special to help rebuild New Jersey’s devastated shoreline.

The one-hour program will air Nov. 15 from MTV’s Times Square studio in New York City. It will feature the cast of “Jersey Shore” along with other guests.

The network said Monday the program will solicit contributions for the rebuilding of Seaside Heights, the heart of the Jersey shore and the principal setting for the “Jersey Shore” series.

For this effort, MTV will be partnering with Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization that provides design and construction services to communities in need.

Seaside Heights was among numerous coastal areas devastated by Sandy last week.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Well: Embracing Children for Who They Are

Contrary to what some parents might believe or hope for, children are not born a blank slate. Rather, they come into the world with predetermined abilities, proclivities and temperaments that nurturing parents may be able to foster or modify, but can rarely reverse.

Perhaps no one knows this better than Jeanne and John Schwartz, parents of three children, the youngest of whom — Joseph — is completely different from the other two.

Offered a bin of toys, their daughter, Elizabeth, picked out the Barbies and their son Sam the trucks. But Joseph, like his sister, ignored the trucks and chose the dolls, which he dressed with great care. He begged for pink light-up shoes with rhinestones and, at 3, asked to be “a disco yady” for Halloween.

Joseph loved words and books, but “our attempts to get him into sports, which Sam had loved so much, were frustrating bordering on the disastrous,” Mr. Schwartz, a national correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in a caring and instructive new memoir, “Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with his Sexuality” (Gotham Books).

“This is not just a book about raising a gay child,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “It’s about raising children who are different,” both recognizing and adapting to those differences and being advocates for the children who possess them. Citing the novel “The Martian Child,” about an adopted son, he said, “We’ve got to take care of our little Martians.”

Adjust Expectations

The goal of parenting should be to raise children with a healthy self-image and self-esteem, ingredients vital to success in school and life. That means accepting children the way they are born — gay or straight, athletic or cerebral, gentle or tough, highly intelligent or less so, scrawny or chubby, shy or outgoing, good eaters or picky ones.

Of course, to the best of their ability, parents should give children opportunities to learn and enjoy activities that might be outside their natural bent. But, as attested to in many a memoir, forcing children to follow a prescribed formula almost always backfires.

For example, everyone in my family is a jock, with a strong belief in the importance of physical activity. Everyone, that is, except one of my four grandsons. Now 10, he is an intellectual, and has been since age 3, when he learned the entire world’s atlas of animals. He absorbs scientific information like a sponge and retains it. He can tell you about deep-sea creatures, planets and stars, chemical reactions, exotic caterpillars, geological formations — you name it — and he’s a whiz at the computer. But he has no athletic interest or apparent ability. His parents have introduced him to a variety of team and individual sports, but so far none has clicked.

Rather than try to remake him into someone he is not, the challenge for all of us is to appreciate and adapt to his differences, love him for who he is and not disparage him for what he is not. While the other three boys get basketballs, bicycles and tennis rackets as gifts, for his 10th birthday I gave him a huge book on the universe, which became his bedtime reading.

Lives Enriched

One persuasive voice for differences in children and how families must adapt better is Andrew Solomon, author of an ambitious new book, “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity,” published this month by Scribner. Mr. Solomon, a gay man who has fathered four children, one of whom he is raising with his husband, has explored in depth the challenges and rewards of family diversity.

Mr. Solomon, who has written articles for The Times, interviewed more than 300 families, most of whom have successfully raised children who are deaf, dwarfs, autistic, schizophrenic, transgender, are prodigies or have Down syndrome, as well as those who were conceived in rape or became criminals.

He makes a strong case for accepting one’s children for who they are and, at the same time, helping them become the best they can be. Especially poignant is his account of a family with a high-functioning son with Down syndrome. For years, the boy progressed academically on pace with his peers and was a poster child for what a person with Down syndrome could do. But when the son could go no further, his mother recognized that he needed to be in a group home.

“We had worked so hard to make him the Down syndrome guy who didn’t need it,” the mother told Mr. Solomon. “But I had to look at what was best for him, and not some ideal we had built up for ourselves.”

Most of the parents interviewed found a lot of meaning and many rewards in dealing with a child who was different. “They told me it has given them a so much richer life that they wouldn’t have given it up for all the world,” Mr. Solomon said. “There are many ways to exist in this world and many different ways to be happy.”

As Mr. Schwartz described Joseph: “He’s a delightful guy, a joy. I couldn’t have made that mold. You can’t expect your kids to turn out as you planned, but you can be thrilled by how they turn out.”

He added: “You want your children to achieve and be comfortable with who they are. You should advocate for them and help them develop the skills to advocate for themselves. But parents shouldn’t try to mold their children. When you expect your kids to fit into a mold, especially a mold of your own making, you’ll be disappointed.”

Schools, too, should know how to accommodate children who are different, said Mr. Schwartz, whose book details the struggles his son faced even in a town with great schools.

It’s not just a matter of schools dealing effectively with bullying, he said. “Jeanne and I believe schools can do a lot with the resources they have to embrace differences in kids and recognize when they are unduly stressed,” he said.

Even with accepting and encouraging parents, Joseph Schwartz was unable for years to acknowledge his gay identity, which resulted in serious academic, social and psychological problems. Each of Mr. Solomon’s families also faced identity struggles, and many were helped greatly by finding peers with similar challenges, a task made so much easier by the Internet.

For many parents, he said, raising children who were different was “an occasion for growth that introduced them to social networks they never imagined.”

He said, “It added richness to the lives of those who said they could see a positive side to having a child who was different.”

Read More..

A Media Vow of Election Night Restraint Despite Social Media Clamor

This has been the year of the big media gaffe.

NBC News edited a 911 tape of George Zimmerman in a way that implied race as a factor in the Trayvon Martin shooting. CNN and Fox News falsely reported that the Supreme Court had struck down the individual mandate at the heart of the Obama administration’s health care law. ABC News wrongly suggested a link between a mass shooting in Colorado and the Tea Party. Just last week during the storm, CNN repeated a false rumor about flooding at the New York Stock Exchange.

Now the media are gearing up for election night, the finale of the year’s biggest story. It’s a chance to regain some credibility — presuming, of course, that television networks and other news organizations get their state-by-state projections right. They all say they will, still mindful of the mistakes made in 2000, when the networks prematurely called Florida for Al Gore and then George W. Bush.

The same precautions that were put in place after 2000 will be in place again this Tuesday. At NBC, for instance, the statisticians at the “decision desk” that makes projections “are literally sealed off from the rest of us,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, the senior vice president of specials for NBC News.

Different this time will be the level of noise on the Web, where armchair and professional pundits alike will react to the election results in real time. On election night in 2008, a few Web sites, including Slate and Time.com, stated the obvious — that Barack Obama was going to win the presidency — well before the TV networks and major newspapers said so. In large part that’s because the networks and newspapers were waiting for the polls to close on the West Coast.

They will abide by the same principle again on Tuesday night, ruling out any such pronouncement before 11 p.m. Eastern. But more Web sites and individual users will most likely try to call the race early, creating a cacophony on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

A memo on Saturday to employees of The Associated Press, the country’s biggest news wire service, asked them to refrain from adding to the noise by posting to Twitter about other news outlets’ calls. “If A.P. has not called a particular state or race, it’s because we have specifically decided not to, based on the expertise and data we have spent years developing,” the memo read.

In calling a state for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney, news organizations will consider several data sources, including exit poll results and raw vote totals — “a brain trust of data,” said Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, the vice president for news for CBS News.

Executives at the major networks said in interviews that they don’t expect to be able to project a winner at 11 p.m. this year, given the closeness of the presidential race in several swing states. “I’m not even going to guess what time it will be,” said Marc Burstein, the senior executive producer for special events at ABC News. He predicted an abundance of caution this year because of the trend of early voting in many states.

For election night ABC is uniquely situated in Times Square, which filled up with supporters of Mr. Obama on election night in 2008. This time, too, “I expect a gigantic crowd,” Mr. Burstein said. NBC is expecting the same at Rockefeller Plaza, which it has re-christened Democracy Plaza with exhibits and video screens, just as it did in 2004 and 2008.

All of the executives interviewed said they would be entirely comfortable making projections after their competitors. “In a close contest, we’ll simply wait,” said Sam Feist, the Washington bureau chief for CNN. And all of them cited the journalism chestnut that it’s better to be right than first. “It’s always lovely when the two coincide,” said Ms. Ciprian-Matthews of CBS, “but everybody here is absolutely on the same page: accuracy comes first.”

Fox News did not respond to an interview request.

CNN, which was criticized for crowding its studio with anchors and analysts in 2008, will have more reporters in the field this time, including a half-dozen in Ohio alone. Reprising what it called “ballot cams” on primary nights, CNN will have crews at “key voting and vote-counting locations” in battleground states, Mr. Feist said.

“We proved during the primaries that doing real reporting on those nights can make a difference,” he said.

No matter the outcome, some partisans will claim that the election is illegitimate, if the election year rhetoric is to be believed. Continuing an effort that started in 2004, networks and other news outlets will ask the public to alert them to voter irregularities and allegations of voter suppression. “We have an entire team working on those stories,” Mr. Lukasiewicz of NBC said.

Dozens of news and opinion Web sites will offer essentially live coverage on election night, some with TV-like newscasts and others with live blogs. But the biggest audiences are still expected to tune to the big three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, and the big three cable news networks, Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.

Four years ago, Brian Williams was the anchor on NBC, Charles Gibson on ABC and Katie Couric on CBS. Mr. Williams is back for his second presidential election night as anchor, but Mr. Gibson, who retired three years ago, will not; heading the coverage instead will be the pair that sat alongside him in 2008, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. Ms. Couric, now of ABC, will join them from time to time with social media reaction — a role that did not exist on the network’s coverage last time.

On CBS, Scott Pelley will anchor his first presidential election night. It’s also the first time for Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC, and Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly, on Fox News. On PBS, Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff will make up national television’s first two-woman anchor team on election night.

Half a dozen smaller channels will also have hours of live election talk, as will countless local stations — paid for in part by the revenue from innumerable election ads. Discussing the extent of the coverage, Mr. Feist of CNN said, “You cannot find an available high-definition satellite path for Tuesday night in this country. There are none left. The country is at capacity.”

Read More..

Keeping 007 relevant in a changed world

NEW YORK — Early in "Skyfall," Judi Dench's M pulls aside our embattled hero, played once again with suave ennui by Daniel Craig, and wonders whether the world still needs either of their services. As Bond wraps his head around that idea, he looks searchingly at his boss. "So this is it?" he wonders. "We're both played out?"

Questions about relevance dangle throughout the new James Bond movie, which opens in the U.S., after a crescendo of marketing, on Nov 9. Field agents are of diminishing importance in an era of cyber-spying and drone warfare, and the uniqueness of Bond's gadgets has been diluted at a time when everyone and their great-aunt carries an iPhone.

PHOTOS: James Bond through the years

Yet as the film franchise turns 50 (yes, someone born the year "Dr. No" came out is now eligible to join AARP) themes of retirement and sell-by dates aren't simply screenplay fodder — they pertain to the franchise itself.

After strong early reviews and solid overseas business, the latest Bond adventure sweeps into theaters with blockbuster expectations. But even if the Sony release blows the doors off the box office like, well, 007 making a grand entrance, it can't hide what those who worked on it quietly acknowledge — making this movie was a more difficult and delicate undertaking than ever.

No longer is a successful Bond movie simply a matter of dialing up clever dialogue and dazzling set pieces. Facing a world that would be unrecognizable to those behind the early Ian Fleming adaptations, Bond filmmakers and actors grapple on many levels with how to keep the series fresh.

They must find ways for a tuxedo-wearing, martini-swilling protagonist to stay relatable while a global downturn rages. They need to project a contemporary degree of villainy in a world where the threat of Islamist terrorism is, for a variety of reasons, not as easily portrayed as the enemies and fears of the Cold War.

They want to retain at least a hint of gravitas after years of Austin Powers and Johnny English.

Maybe most important, they struggle with how to avoid what might be called the quaintness trap — staying relevant in a cinema culture that has seen the rise of splashy CG action movies on the one hand and modern truth-seekers a la Jason Bourne on the other.

"The theme of our story is that we have to question if the old classic things still work," said Javier Bardem, who plays the villain in "Skyfall," directed by Sam Mendes. "It's implied in every character in this movie. But it's also the question about the James Bond franchise."

New obstacles

For years, Barbara Broccoli, the longtime producer and steward of the spy series (total box office: about $5 billion), knew that she wanted a film for the franchise's 50th anniversary. "Bond 23," as "Skyfall" soon became known, was a way of honoring her late father, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, who died in 1996 and was heavily responsible for putting Fleming's work on the screen. It also offered a third act in the Craig-led Bond.

About three years ago, with the blessing of studio MGM, Broccoli and stepbrother/fellow producer Michael Wilson hired the longtime Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, along with "The Queen" scribe Peter Morgan. At nearly the same time they brought on Mendes, the British director of "American Beauty" who was in a slump after his young-marrieds drama "Away We Go" flopped in 2009.

Then MGM filed for bankruptcy, and suddenly everyone was frozen in place. (To avoid legal action from creditors, Mendes was retained off the books as a "consultant.")

PHOTOS: The Bond girls

"It was a nightmare," Broccoli recalled. "This was one of those situations that's really frustrating — when all the delays have nothing to do with the making of the movie." Craig's attitude was even more bleak. "I thought OK, we might have to say goodbye to this," he said in an interview in New York several weeks ago. "And that made me really sad." In the hiatus, Morgan left, replaced by the veteran John Logan ("Hugo").

MGM was finally reconstituted with new owners. But now came another problem: how to make Bond dramatically relevant again. The franchise wasn't just long in the tooth — it was coming off a disappointing entry in 2008's "Quantum of Solace." Craig acknowledged in the interview that the movie wasn't "satisfying." Wilson said that, after witnessing the critical reception, he thought, "Oh God, we really screwed this up."

A big reason for that was Bond's nemesis. During the decades that the series provided a catharsis for the Soviet threat, it was easy to put a face on the menace. But since the Iron Curtain fell — and especially after the attacks of Sept. 11 — that was a lot tougher.

In "Casino Royale," Craig's initiation, filmmakers used a clever work-around: They channeled the demons that would normally reside in the villain into the hero. Craig's Bond was grimmer and darker, which not only made for a compelling character but for some juicy zeitgeist stuff, Bond's beleaguered air matching our post-Sept. 11 anxiety.

In "Quantum," writers essentially opted out, creating villains and stakes that had little to do with the headlines (they involved a Bolivian coup and the arcana of water rights.) The film was rushed into production after the writers strike — "you shouldn't try to rewrite whole sections of the story while you're shooting," Craig noted dryly — and the results were wobbly.

Read More..

Head Hunter: Rare Specimens From a World-Class Skull Collection

If you were to go clicking down Alan Dudley’s anonymous-looking English street in Google’s Street View, there’d be no reason to stop outside his anonymous-looking English home. But inside, in a space no bigger than a child’s bedroom, Dudley has amassed one of the world’s most impressive private collections of skulls -- some 2,500 of them, incredibly well-organized and impeccably preserved. A good chunk of the animal kingdom is represented -- fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals fill the space.

British journalist Simon Winchester’s first reaction to the collection was horror. “I thought, ‘This is macabre, this is horrible, this is grotesque,’ because I was, I think like most of us, brought up to associate skulls with piracy or warning or danger or death,” Winchester says. “But then you see beneath the muscle and the skin something so beautiful, so finely constructed, that you can understand the fascination that someone like Dudley has. It may sound rather corny, but it gives you a new reverence for life.”

Winchester was so moved that he, along with an ex-BBC producer, created an app that showcased the collection. Though highly regarded when it launched last year, the app didn’t sell particularly well. But publishers in New York were interested in the material. When he was asked to turn the app into a book, Winchester happily agreed. The result is Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection, which was published earlier this month. The book features hundreds of Dudley’s skulls, supplemented with rarer specimens and Winchester’s writings on skull lore and history. We spoke to Winchester about what he learned and the most interesting skulls he discovered. These are some of his favorites.

Above:

Winchester loves “the extraordinary canine teeth that look like horns but are actually teeth which curve back into its own head and make it look utterly weird.”

Read More..

Anti-Obama “2016″ doc getting last-ditch digital release before election

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “2016: Obama‘s America,” the hit documentary critical of President Obama’s record, is getting a last-minute digital push in Spanish in a bid to boost Mitt Romney‘s chances ahead of the November 6 election, the producers of the movie told TheWrap on Friday.

The producers, who already have digital distribution in English with Lionsgate, have struck a new deal with digital company Yekra to release it in Spanish on Friday, according to Mark Joseph, a representative for the film.

“We’re just finalizing the link – it’s ready to go,” said another individual working on the film. The streamed version in Spanish will cost $ 2.99 and will be aimed at independent voters in Spanish-speaking communities.

Lionsgate released the movie on DVD, video-on-demand and streaming platforms like iTunes and Amazon in mid-October.

The producers hope to swing any remaining independent voters in a race that is neck-and-neck for the two candidates.

A Lionsgate spokesman told TheWrap: “This is commerce for us, not taking sides politically. We’re proud to have released the two highest-grossing political docs of all time, ‘Fahrenheit 911′ and ‘Obama 2016.’”

“2016: Obama’s America,” based on Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” challenges the president’s record and foretells what the nation will be like if he is reelected. Both the Associated Press and the president’s website questioned its many assertions, prompting D’Souza to fire back in an op-ed with TheWrap.

The film has been an unexpected success story, grossing more than $ 33 million at the domestic box office with a reported budget of $ 2.1 million. With its catchphrase, “Love Him. Hate Him. You Don’t Know Him,” it long ago surpassed “Bully” as the year’s top-earning documentary.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Opinion: Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do

HALLUCINATIONS are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?

In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon. The vast majority are benign — and, indeed, in many circumstances, perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time, during a fever or with the sensory monotony of a desert or empty road, or sometimes, seemingly, out of the blue.

Many of us, as we lie in bed with closed eyes, awaiting sleep, have so-called hypnagogic hallucinations — geometric patterns, or faces, sometimes landscapes. Such patterns or scenes may be almost too faint to notice, or they may be very elaborate, brilliantly colored and rapidly changing — people used to compare them to slide shows.

At the other end of sleep are hypnopompic hallucinations, seen with open eyes, upon first waking. These may be ordinary (an intensification of color perhaps, or someone calling your name) or terrifying (especially if combined with sleep paralysis) — a vast spider, a pterodactyl above the bed, poised to strike.

Hallucinations (of sight, sound, smell or other sensations) can be associated with migraine or seizures, with fever or delirium. In chronic disease hospitals, nursing homes, and I.C.U.’s, hallucinations are often a result of too many medications and interactions between them, compounded by illness, anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings.

But hallucinations can have a positive and comforting role, too — this is especially true with bereavement hallucinations, seeing the face or hearing the voice of one’s deceased spouse, siblings, parents or child — and may play an important part in the mourning process. Such bereavement hallucinations frequently occur in the first year or two of bereavement, when they are most “needed.”

Working in old-age homes for many years, I have been struck by how many elderly people with impaired hearing are prone to auditory and, even more commonly, musical hallucinations — involuntary music in their minds that seems so real that at first they may think it is a neighbor’s stereo.

People with impaired sight, similarly, may start to have strange, visual hallucinations, sometimes just of patterns but often more elaborate visions of complex scenes or ranks of people in exotic dress. Perhaps 20 percent of those losing their vision or hearing may have such hallucinations.

I was called in to see one patient, Rosalie, a blind lady in her 90s, when she started to have visual hallucinations; the staff psychiatrist was also summoned. Rosalie was concerned that she might be having a stroke or getting Alzheimer’s or reacting to some medication. But I was able to reassure her that nothing was amiss neurologically. I explained to her that if the visual parts of the brain are deprived of actual input, they are hungry for stimulation and may concoct images of their own. Rosalie was greatly relieved by this, and delighted to know that there was even a name for her condition: Charles Bonnet syndrome. “Tell the nurses,” she said, drawing herself up in her chair, “that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome!”

Rosalie asked me how many people had C.B.S., and I told her hundreds of thousands, perhaps, in the United States alone. I told her that many people were afraid to mention their hallucinations. I described a recent study of elderly blind patients in the Netherlands which found that only a quarter of people with C.B.S. mentioned it to their doctors — the others were too afraid or too ashamed. It is only when physicians gently inquire (often avoiding the word “hallucination”) that people feel free to admit seeing things that are not there — despite their blindness.

Rosalie was indignant at this, and said, “You must write about it — tell my story!” I do tell her story, at length, in my book on hallucinations, along with the stories of many others. Most of these people have been reluctant to admit to their hallucinations. Often, when they do, they are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed — told that it’s nothing, or that their condition has no explanation.

Misdiagnosis is especially common if people admit to “hearing voices.” In a famous 1973 study by the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, eight “pseudopatients” presented themselves at various hospitals across the country, saying that they “heard voices.” All behaved normally otherwise, but were nonetheless determined to be (and treated as) schizophrenic (apart from one, who was given the diagnosis of “manic-depressive psychosis”). In this and follow-up studies, Professor Rosenhan demonstrated convincingly that auditory hallucinations and schizophrenia were synonymous in the medical mind.

WHILE many people with schizophrenia do hear voices at certain times in their lives, the inverse is not true: most people who hear voices (as much as 10 percent of the population) are not mentally ill. For them, hearing voices is a normal mode of experience.

My patients tell me about their hallucinations because I am open to hearing about them, because they know me and trust that I can usually run down the cause of their hallucinations. For the most part, these experiences are unthreatening and, once accommodated, even mildly diverting.

David Stewart, a Charles Bonnet syndrome patient with whom I corresponded, writes of his hallucinations as being “altogether friendly,” and imagines his eyes saying: “Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we’ve organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can manage.”

Mr. Stewart has been able to take his hallucinations in good humor, since he knows they are not a sign of mental decline or madness. For too many patients, though, the shame, the secrecy, the stigma, persists.

Oliver Sacks is a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “Hallucinations.”

Read More..

Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of Wize Commerce, seen with employees. He says that about 60 percent of the traffic for the company’s Nextag comparison-shopping site comes from Google.

In a geeky fire drill, engineers and outside consultants at Nextag scrambled to see if the problem was its own fault. Maybe some inadvertent change had prompted Google’s algorithm to demote Nextag when a person typed in shopping-related search terms like “kitchen table” or “lawn mower.”

But no, the engineers determined. And traffic from Google’s search engine continued to decline, by half.

Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months.

The move was costly but necessary to retain shoppers, Mr. Katz says, because an estimated 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic comes from Google, both from free search and paid search ads, which are ads that are related to search results and appear next to them. “We had to do it,” says Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag. “We’re living in Google’s world.”

Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.

So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.

The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.

The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission has recommended preparing an antitrust suit against Google, according to people briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on the condition they not be identified. But the commissioners must vote to proceed. Even if they do, the government and Google could settle.

Google has drawn the attention of antitrust officials as it has moved aggressively beyond its dominant product — search and search advertising — into fields like online commerce and local reviews. The antitrust issue is whether Google uses its search engine to favor its offerings like Google Shopping and Google Plus Local over rivals.

For policy makers, Google is a tough call.

“What to do with an attractive monopolist, like Google, is a really challenging issue for antitrust,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior adviser to the F.T.C. “The goal is to encourage them to stay in power by continuing to innovate instead of excluding competitors.”

SPEAKING at a Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona last month, Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said he understood the government scrutiny of his company, given Google’s size and reach. “There’s very many decisions we make that really impact a lot of people,” he acknowledged.

The main reason is that Google is continually adjusting its search algorithm — the smart software that determines the relevance, ranking and presentation of search results, typically links to other Web sites.

Google says it makes the changes to improve its service, and has long maintained that its algorithm weeds out low-quality sites and shows the most useful results, whether or not they link to Google products.

“Our first and highest goal has to be to get the user the information they want as quickly and easily as possible,” says Matt Cutts, leader of the Web spam team at Google.

But Google’s algorithm is secret, and changes can leave Web sites scrambling.

Consider Vote-USA.org, a nonprofit group started in 2003. It provides online information for voters to avoid the frustration of arriving at a polling booth and barely recognizing half the names on the ballot. The site posts free sample ballots for federal, state and local elections with candidates’ pictures, biographies and views on issues.

In the 2004 and 2006 elections, users created tens of thousands of sample ballots. By 2008, traffic had fallen sharply, says Ron Kahlow, who runs Vote-USA.org, because “we dropped off the face of the map on Google.”

As founder of a search-engine optimization company and a recipient of grants that Google gives nonprofits to advertise free, Mr. Kahlow knows a thing or two about how to operate in Google’s world. He pored over Google’s guidelines for Web sites, made changes and e-mailed Google. Yet he received no response.

“I lost all donations to support the operation,” he said. “It was very, very painful.”

A breakthrough came through a personal connection. A friend of Mr. Kahlow knew Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google. Mr. Black made an inquiry on Mr. Kahlow’s behalf, and a Google engineer investigated.

Read More..