I just found this fascinating account of how Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear while seemingly severely mentally ill, the event that led him to paint one of his most famous pictures.

The account is apparently reconstructed from known events at the time but also has van Gogh’s own description of the event, taken from letters to his sister.

On Christmas Eve 1888, after Gauguin already had announced he would leave, van Gogh suddenly threw a glass of absinthe in Gauguin’s face, then was brought home and put to bed by his companion. A bizarre sequence of events ensued. When Gauguin left their house, van Gogh followed and approached him with an open razor, was repelled, went home, and cut off part of his left earlobe, which he then presented to Rachel, his favorite prostitute.

The police were alerted; he was found unconscious at his home and was hospitalized. There he lapsed into an acute psychotic state with agitation, hallucinations, and delusions that required 3 days of solitary confinement. He retained no memory of his attacks on Gauguin, the self-mutilation, or the early part of his stay at the hospital…

At the hospital, Felix Rey, the young physician attending van Gogh, diagnosed epilepsy and prescribed potassium bromide. Within days, van Gogh recovered from the psychotic state. About 3 weeks after admission, he was able to paint Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear and Pipe, which shows him in serene composure. At the time of recovery and during the following weeks, he described his own mental state in letters to Theo and his sister Wilhelmina: “The intolerable hallucinations have ceased, in fact have diminished to a simple nightmare, as a result of taking potassium bromide, I believe.”

“I am rather well just now, except for a certain undercurrent of vague sadness difficult to explain.” “While I am absolutely calm at the present moment, I may easily relapse into a state of overexcitement on account of fresh mental emotion.” He also noted “three fainting fits without any plausible reason, and without retaining the slightest remembrance of what I felt” Although absinthe is commonly associated with hallucinations and madness, and the author of the article wonders whether it might have helped cause his epilepsy, this is unlikely due to the fact that the effect of absinthe’s ‘special ingredient’ is largely a myth. The distinctive aspect of the drink, the chemical thujone from the wordwood plant, is actually present in such small quantities that absinthe has virtually no psychoactive effects beyond the alcohol. However, epilepsy does raise the risk of psychosis and it is suspected that he had temporal lobe epilepsy which is particularly associated with this reality-bending mental state. 

Source: http://www.mindhacks.com

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2011) — Smartphones may be the new hot tool in cognitive psychology research, according to a paper in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Cognitive psychology, which explores how people perceive, think, remember, and more, often relies on testing volunteers that come to a research facility to participate in behavioral experiments. This data collection method generally results in relatively small, homogeneous group of test subjects, which can bias the results and limit the extent to which researchers can interpret their data.

Collecting data via smartphones, on the other hand, may be the answer to this long-standing issue by helping scientists reach larger and more varied populations, the researchers suggest. To illustrate, the authors have begun a large-scale iPhone/iPad-based language study investigating people’s ability to distinguish words from similar non-words, for example, “table” versus “tible.” They began the project in December 2010 and have already collected data from 4,157 subjects. For comparison, a study on a similar topic that used traditional data-collection methods took more than three years to collect approximately the same amount of data.

Moreover, the project is being conducted in seven different languages (English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Dutch, and Malay) across the world. According to the authors, “this innovative research involving volunteer smartphone users from all over the world not only allows us to better understand how the brain recognizes words, but indeed opens up vast possibilities for future large-scale research on aspects of human cognition such as memory and aging, cultural differences in perception of facial emotional expression, or reading development in children.”