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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.

The American Journal of Psychiatry just published a new editorial on the subject of Internet addiction, recommending inclusion of criteria for the DSM-V, set to publish in 2011. Interestingly, most of the data for this comes out of South Korea, which is arguably the most wired country in the world right now - broadband penetration touches nearly all of population and mind blowing access speeds of 40 Mbs or higher are common. Could Korean issues be a harbinger for the rest of the world when its Internet infrastructure catches up? No doubt many will find this somewhat controversial...

Conceptually, the diagnosis is a compulsive-impulsive spectrum disorder that involves online and/or offline computer usage and consists of at least three subtypes: excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, and e-mail/text messaging. All of the variants share the following four components: 1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives, 2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible, 3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue.

Excellent article in the NY Times on Big Pharma's newest breakthrough in schizophrenia - some very promising research. This excerpt is a good summary of the basic science leading to this new drug:

“We do not know with any of these neuropsychiatric disorders what the ultimate basis is,” Dr. Greengard says. “Let’s say you could find that too much of protein X was involved in schizophrenia. Would you then know what schizophrenia is? You would not.”

Nonetheless, the findings in rats were promising. Those studies, as well as Dr. Krystal’s tests in 2001 of volunteers given ketamine, a drug that has effects similar to PCP, hinted that the glutamate drugs might help to treat the cognitive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Drugs currently on the market do little to treat those symptoms.

Even before the findings at Yale, Lilly had put its first metabotropic glutamate receptor compound into human testing. Researchers initially tested the drug on patients with panic disorder, and it showed some positive results. But Lilly stopped human testing of the drug in 2001 when long-term testing in animals showed that it caused seizures.

Even so, Lilly decided that it had enough evidence to justify tests of another chemical compound, LY404039, that affected the same receptors.

“They had to take a risk on letting these drugs be tested on models or for disorders that were justified purely on pretty basic science,” Dr. Krystal says. “There is nothing with these drugs that is straightforward or makes developing them a basic path.”

When it tried to test LY404039 in humans, the company ran into yet another hurdle. The human body didn’t easily absorb it. So Lilly created a drug that the body could absorb, LY2140023, which is metabolized into LY404039 in the body.

Bingo. LY2140023 was the drug that got Dr. Schoepp jumping out of his office chair in 2006, nearly three years after the first trials in humans began. In the Lilly test, the drug was slightly less effective over all than Zyprexa, which is considered the most effective among the widely used schizophrenia treatments.

But LY2140023 also appeared to have fewer side effects than Zyprexa, which can cause severe weight gain and diabetes. The new drug also appeared to improve cognition, something that existing treatments don’t do, said Dr. Insel of the National Institute of Mental Health.

The BBC episode Total Isolation aired a couple weeks ago, and is an absolutely fascinating documentary on sensory deprivation and its impact on the mind. Without too much editorial (blogging time is limited these days), we'll post the BBC summary directly:

For the first time in 40 years Horizon re-creates a controversial sensory deprivation experiment. Six ordinary people are taken to a nuclear bunker and left alone for 48 hours. Three subjects are left alone in dark, sound-proofed rooms, while the other three are given goggles and foam cuffs, while white noise is piped into their ears.

The original experiments carried out in the 1950s and 60s by leading psychologist Prof Donald Hebb, was thought by many in the North American political and scientific establishment to be too cruel and were discontinued.

Prof Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at St George's Hospital, Tooting, has been treating some of the British Guantanamo detainees and the victims of torture who come to the UK from across the world. Now he evaluates the volunteers as their brains undergo strange alterations.

The NY Times has an interesting article this week on the competitive advantage associated with anxiety and people who feel like a fraud. The theory of Evolutionary psychology is one theoretical approach to mental health which attempts to explain a number of psychological issues as the outcome of natural selection, where positive and negative traits are often mixed. In the article, Benedict Carey details how feeling like a fraud can compel you to perform better:

But the dread of being found out is hardly always paralyzing. Two Purdue psychologists, Shamala Kumar and Carolyn M. Jagacinski, gave 135 college students a series of questionnaires, measuring anxiety level, impostor feelings and approach to academic goals. They found that women who scored highly also reported a strong desire to show that they could do better than others. They competed harder.

By contrast, men who scored highly on the impostor scale showed more desire to avoid contests in areas where they felt vulnerable. “The motivation was to avoid doing poorly, looking weak,” Dr. Jagacinski said.

Yet if feelings of phoniness were all bad, it seems unlikely that they would be so familiar to so many emotionally well-adapted people.