Blog

We are finally out of the initial Mindsite soft launch! Matt Kenison, Director of Engineering, flipped the switch over this last weekend and took us live with some substantial improvements to our platform. We've incorporated quite a bit of feedback from friends of Mindsite over the last 2 months and we hope that this new version of the site solves a number of problems associated with our prior release. In addition to ditching our previously pouty stock photography on the homepage, noteworthy updates include:

• New diagnostic surveys. We've added diagnostics surveys for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Alcohol abuse and dependence, and a number of substance abuse surveys (see the full list). PTSD was a particularly difficult survey to implement and lead product manager Joshua Walker made a heroic effort wrestling with the complicated algorithms necessary to support this diagnosis. We hope that the PTSD feature will be helpful to anyone, worldwide, wondering if they meet the criteria for this increasingly common mental health condition given the chaotic state of the world. In time we hope to support more than just an English version of the survey…
• Question and Answer. With little effort you can now ask a quick question to the Mindsite community as well as help other Mindsite users by answering their questions. We’ll be improving this feature in the future so please pipe up with any further recommendations.
• New information architecture and design. Navigation and interaction on Mindsite is now based around specific mental health conditions. In our prior release, users liked our diagnostic surveys but found the site very confusing in terms of community participation. Hopefully, the new format will make interacting with Mindsite easier, leading to better information about strategies for treating and coping with various mental health issues. Moreover, we have a cleaner user interface and design in place now.

We are moving to a more frequent release schedule now that we have shipped our v2. If you have any ideas for how we can improve the site, please let us know in the comments, or send us a note at feedback AT mindsite.com. Thanks.

We apologize for the pronounced blogging delay, among other things. Although our production code base has not been moving, we certainly have -- we'll be back in full swing shortly with a fully revamped user experience and new look based on our soft launch feedback. We interrupt our engineering efforts to bring you an interesting update on the mind.

Yesterday, Benedict Carey wrote in the NY Times about new developments in mental health and what is becoming an increasingly popular psychotherapy tecehnique, mindfulness meditation. A summary of the practice is described below.

Mindfulness meditation is easy to describe. Sit in a comfortable position, eyes closed, preferably with the back upright and unsupported. Relax and take note of body sensations, sounds and moods. Notice them without judgment. Let the mind settle into the rhythm of breathing. If it wanders (and it will), gently redirect attention to the breath. Stay with it for at least 10 minutes.

After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought -- about, say, a strained relationship with a parent -- and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.

You can read more about this approach in the Mindfulness-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy article from Wikipedia, here. Carey's article follows closely behind another recent NY Times column by David Brooks entitled The Neural Buddhists, which argues that among other things, science is moving a direction that is more consistent with Buddhism than reductionist 'militant materialism' where our thought processes and cognition are merely representations of chemical and electrical activity in our central nervous system.

Perhaps the crux of what Brooks is getting at is best summarized in Sharon Begley's book Train your Mind, Change Your Brain where she argues that not only do neurophysiological states produces mental states, but that mental states can also work backwards and act on the brain itself. A parallel example would be a computer whose hardware executes a software program, only to have that program then change the silicon substrate of the CPU.

For an excellent, albeit long, review of the science of the mind and its overlap with Buddhism, Zen and Brain by James Austin, is a must read. Austin argues that rigorous meditation practice literally removes or forms new neural pathways in the mind as meditators experience life altering flashes of insight (or changes in how we experience reality), which Zen practitioners call Kensho. If you are an engineering or science inclined individual looking for non-pharmaceutical approaches to depression and anxiety, this book may be a reasonable place to start for 10,000 foot view of the subject.

Finally, John Safran provides a hilarious and irreverent view of modern Zen. The remaining 3:30 of Part 2 is here.

The 'dangers' of caffeine are well documented in the DSM-IV. This is a humorous spoof on a subject that likely impacts a lot of normal peoples' sleep and anxiety levels. Listed symptoms include restlessness, nervousness, insomnia, muscle twitching, rambling flow of thought and speech, tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia (heart palpatations), and psychomotor agitation.

Diagnostic criteria for 305.90 Caffeine Intoxication

1. Recent consumption of caffeine, usually in excess of 250 mg (e.g., more than 2-3 cups of brewed coffee).
2. Five (or more) of the following signs, developing during, or shortly after, caffeine use:
   1. restlessness
   2. nervousness
   3. excitement
   4. insomnia
   5. flushed face
   6. diuresis
   7. gastrointestinal disturbance
   8. muscle twitching
   9. rambling flow of thought and speech
   10. tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia
   11. periods of inexhaustibility
   12. psychomotor agitation
3. The symptoms in Criterion B cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
4. The symptoms are not due to a general medical condition and are not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., an Anxiety Disorder).

This week The Economist released a new story about a European collaboration of scientists who are trying to “explain religion.” The intersection of the religious experience and psychology takes many forms and has been a source of great interest, perhaps since humans developed language capabilities. William James, a seminal figure who spent a considerable amount of time analyzing the intersection of psychology and religion notes in his 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, that “Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life.” For an excellent, albeit brief, NPR audio summary of Jame's life work, click here.

The Economist article does an excellent job framing a number of recent academic studies in this area, most of which are viewed from the lens of evolutionary psychology.

Explaining Religion is an ambitious attempt to do this. The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.