text:
Face stimuli. HSF indicates high spatial frequency; LSF, low spatial frequency; and NSF, normal spatial frequency. (On reproduction, the HSF image in this figure lost some of the detail that was visible in the experiment.)
Blocked design for the presentation of face and control stimuli. HSF indicates high spatial frequency; LSF, low spatial frequency; and NSF, normal spatial frequency. Between subjects, differently ordered runs were counterbalanced using a Latin square design.
Mean reaction times for the body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and control groups by task (2-way analysis of variance with 1 repeated-measures factor): group effect: F1,23 = 0.03, P = .86; task effect: F3,72 = 70.67, P < .001; and group × task effect: F3,72 = 1.00, P = .40. HSF indicates high spatial frequency; LSF, low spatial frequency; and NSF, normal spatial frequency.
Parametric maps of statistically significant activation between groups for high spatial frequency (HSF), low spatial frequency (LSF), and normal spatial frequency (NSF) face tasks, all contrasted to the control task of matching ovals and circles. For simplicity, only representative axial sections are shown. The red spectrum indicates regions for which the body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) group showed greater activation than the control group. Presented in radiologic convention (the right hemisphere on the left and the left hemisphere on the right). L indicates left; R, right.
Three-dimensional representation of statistically significant regions of greater brain activation for the subjects with body dysmorphic disorder compared with control subjects for low spatial frequency faces projected on an individual high-resolution volume scan (mri3dX software [http://www.aston.ac.uk/lhs/research/groups/nrg/mri3dx/index.jsp]). L indicates left; R, right.
Mean ± SEM percentage signal change in the right and left amygdala for the body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and control groups by task contrast: NSF (normal spatial frequency) vs control task, LSF (low spatial frequency) vs control task, and HSF (high spatial frequency) vs control task. There were statistically significant different mean activations in the right amygdala for the *LSF task (t = 3.26, P = .003) and for the †HSF task (t = 2.4, P = .03).
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Feusner JD, Townsend J, Bystritsky A, Bookheimer S. Visual Information Processing of Faces in Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2007;64(12):1417–1425. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.64.12.1417
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Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a severe psychiatric condition in which individuals are preoccupied with perceived appearance defects. Clinical observation suggests that patients with BDD focus on details of their appearance at the expense of configural elements. This study examines abnormalities in visual information processing in BDD that may underlie clinical symptoms.
To determine whether patients with BDD have abnormal patterns of brain activation when visually processing others' faces with high, low, or normal spatial frequency information.
Case-control study.
University hospital.
Twelve right-handed, medication-free subjects with BDD and 13 control subjects matched by age, sex, and educational achievement.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing matching tasks of face stimuli. Stimuli were neutral-expression photographs of others' faces that were unaltered, altered to include only high spatial frequency visual information, or altered to include only low spatial frequency visual information.
Main Outcome Measure
Blood oxygen level–dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging signal changes in the BDD and control groups during tasks with each stimulus type.
Subjects with BDD showed greater left hemisphere activity relative to controls, particularly in lateral prefrontal cortex and lateral temporal lobe regions for all face tasks (and dorsal anterior cingulate activity for the low spatial frequency task). Controls recruited left-sided prefrontal and dorsal anterior cingulate activity only for the high spatial frequency task.
Subjects with BDD demonstrate fundamental differences from controls in visually processing others' faces. The predominance of left-sided activity for low spatial frequency and normal faces suggests detail encoding and analysis rather than holistic processing, a pattern evident in controls only for high spatial frequency faces. These abnormalities may be associated with apparent perceptual distortions in patients with BDD. The fact that these findings occurred while subjects viewed others' faces suggests differences in visual processing beyond distortions of their own appearance.
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a severe psychiatric condition in which patients are preoccupied with perceived physical defects. This causes them to believe that they appear disfigured and ugly. They subsequently experience significant distress, disability, and functional impairment, often accompanied by severe depression and suicidality.1 Body dysmorphic disorder likely affects about 1.7% of the population2 yet is understudied and underrecognized.
A better understanding of the neurobiology of BDD could assist in elucidating the pathophysiology underlying the clinical symptoms. This, in turn, can help improve strategies for clinical management. Little is known about the neurobiology of BDD. To our knowledge, only 2 brain imaging studies of BDD have been published. A volumetric magnetic resonance imaging study3 found leftward shift in caudate asymmetry and greater total white matter volume in 8 women with BDD compared with 8 female control subjects, opposite to typical findings in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).4,5 Using single-photon emission computed tomography, a small functional imaging study6 of 6 patients with BDD showed variable discrepant findings, including relative perfusion deficits in bilateral anteromedial temporal and occipital regions and asymmetric perfusion in parietal lobes. Although this study had no control or comparison group, the findings suggest the possibility of abnormalities in brain regions involved in visual processing and visuospatial functioning.
Clinically, patients with BDD most often perceive "defects" of their face and head areas.7 They tend to frequently check their appearance in mirrors and often scrutinize others' faces. Clinical observation suggests that patients with BDD focus primarily on details, usually their face, at the expense of global or configural aspects. A neuropsychological study8 using the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Copy and Delayed Recall Test demonstrated that patients with BDD performed poorly relative to controls because of differences in organizational strategies, including selective recall of details instead of larger organizational design features. The phenomenology of BDD and the findings from this neuropsychological study suggest that patients with BDD may have aberrant visual information processing. If so, this may represent a core pathophysiological process contributing to the symptoms.
Evidence also suggests that individuals with BDD may have abnormalities in face processing. In a study9 that presented computerized images of their own faces to subjects with BDD, subjects with OCD, and healthy control subjects, half of the BDD and OCD groups but none of the controls perceived distortions that were not actually present. There is also evidence of abnormal processing of emotional faces in BDD. Buhlmann et al10 examined how patients with BDD interpret facial expressions compared with healthy controls and a group having OCD. There were no differences in accuracy between groups in general facial feature recognition for neutral-expression faces. However, individuals with BDD had difficulty interpreting facial expressions, more often misidentifying faces as being angry. Although this may indicate abnormalities specifically in emotional recognition, it may also reflect abnormalities in an earlier component of the core system for visual analysis that is required for facial expression analysis.11,12
Face perception in healthy control subjects seems to be mediated by multiple regions in the extrastriate visual cortex and other nonvisual cortex regions that form a distributed network.11 The inferior occipital gyri, responsible for early perception of facial features, provides input to the superior temporal sulcus (changeable aspects of faces such as expressions) and the lateral fusiform gyrus (invariant aspects of faces).11,12 Functional neuroimaging of face-matching tasks has demonstrated activity in the ventral occipitotemporal and dorsolateral occipitoparietal cortices, as well as prefrontal and temporal regions.13-15
This study aimed to determine whether patients with BDD have a different pattern of brain activation from that of healthy control subjects for different spatial frequencies when viewing faces. Using others' faces rather than their own allows for testing of primary visual processing abnormalities while minimizing the influence of distorted self-representations and symptom provocation. To our knowledge, no functional imaging studies have tested the patterns of visual information processing in patients with BDD or compared patients with BDD with control subjects.
Detailed analysis of facial traits such as edges depicting contours of the nose, eyes, eyelashes, skin blemishes, and exact shape of the mouth relies on fine spatial resolution and texture analysis, which is conveyed by high spatial frequency (HSF) visual information.16,17 Configural aspects of faces (ie, spatial relationships between facial features such as the relative position of the eyes to the mouth and the general shape of the face18) are primarily conveyed by low spatial frequency (LSF) visual information.19,20 Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies21,22 in healthy control subjects demonstrated distinct neural pathways that process HSF vs LSF information. High spatial frequency visual information is projected via parvocellular channels primarily to the ventral cortical stream.23,24 Low spatial frequency visual information is projected via magnocellular channels to the dorsal cortical stream and provides rapid coarse visual signals.25 Matching tasks in which faces are digitally filtered to produce HSF or LSF have been used to investigate mechanisms of visual processing in healthy control subjects26,27 and to identify abnormalities in configural processing in autism.28 We designed 3 sets of facial-matching tasks using digitized photographs of faces that were altered to include only HSF, LSF, or normal spatial frequency (NSF). We used fMRI to identify the functional neuroanatomical correlates of visual processing during the presentation of visual stimuli. We hypothesized that the BDD group would demonstrate abnormal functioning of the dorsal or ventral visual streams. Specifically, relative to control subjects, they may process faces using ventral visual pathways to a greater degree than dorsal visual pathways, as reflected by their apparent visual bias for high levels of detail.
The UCLA Institutional Review Board approved the protocol for the study. We obtained informed consent from 12 subjects with BDD and 13 healthy control subjects (age range, 18-64 years) recruited from the community. The BDD group and controls were matched by sex, age, and educational achievement. All participants were right-handed. All subjects with BDD met DSM-IV criteria for BDD using the Body Dysmorphic Disorder Module,29 a reliable diagnostic module modeled after the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM. In addition, we performed a clinical psychiatric evaluation of all participants and screened them using the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview.30 All subjects with BDD were required to have a score of at least 15 on the BDD version of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (BDD-YBOCS).31 We allowed subjects with delusional beliefs.
Exclusion criteria for subjects and controls included pregnancy, active substance abuse, current neurological disorder, and any current medical disorder that may affect cerebral metabolism. We excluded subjects with any concurrent Axis I disorder other than dysthymia, major depressive disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder. Because depression and anxiety are so frequently comorbid in this population, we believed it would not be a representative sample if we excluded these. However, we excluded subjects with a score higher than 20 on the 17-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS)32 and subjects whom the investigator (J.D.F.) judged were suicidal. In addition to the BDD-YBOCS and the HDRS, we administered the Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAMA)33 to all subjects.
We determined handedness using the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory.34 All participants were free from psychoactive medications for at least 3 weeks before entering the study and were free of fluoxetine hydrochloride for at least 5 weeks. Subjects were not receiving any cognitive behavior therapy. All participants had normal or corrected vision.
We used digitized gray-scale photographs of male and female faces. The faces, validated for neutral emotional expression, came from the Macbrain database,35 the University of Pennsylvania Facial Emotional Stimuli,36 and the Psychological Image Collection at Stirling (http://pics.psych.stir.ac.uk/). We Fourier transformed these 256 × 256–pixel photographs using Scion Imaging Software (http://www.scioncorp.com). Next, we deleted the central 30 × 30 pixels of the transformed images for the high-pass filtered images and deleted all but the central 30 × 30 pixels for the low-pass filtered images.21 We then inversely Fourier transformed these images to create each of the final high-pass or low-pass filtered images. A high-pass filter creates images that contain only HSF information. A low-pass filter creates images that contain only LSF information. In addition, we used unaltered photographs (NSF) of the same size (Figure 1). Three different categories of faces (NSF, HSF, and LSF) comprised the tasks (Figure 2). The control condition consisted of gray ovals and circles approximately the same size as the faces. We used commercially available software (MacStim 3.0; White Ant Occasional Publishing, West Melbourne, Australia) to program the stimuli presentation and to record accuracy and reaction time.
The face-matching task is a forced-choice, 2-alternative test of face perception. Subjects matched digital photographs of unfamiliar emotionally neutral faces of others. The control task consisted of matching ovals and circles. In each task, the subject viewed 3 faces, including the target face on top and 2 comparison faces on the bottom. We instructed subjects to "Choose the face on the bottom that is the same face as the one on the top, by pressing the right or the left button. Make your selection as rapidly and as accurately as possible." Each set of faces appeared on the screen for 4 seconds, with a 1-second interstimulus interval. The task was designed to be easy enough that it would be unlikely to result in behavioral differences between groups.
Each block consisted of 4 sets of the same type of faces that were NSF, HSF, or LSF or the control task. Each set of 4 blocks (A-B-C-control) was repeated 4 times in each run (Figure 2). The total time for each run was 6 minutes and 20 seconds. There were 2 runs, with the second run presented in a different order. Between subjects, the differently ordered runs were counterbalanced using a Latin square design to avoid possible order effects. Subjects wore fMRI-compatible goggles to view the stimuli. If subjects wore eyeglasses, appropriate corrective lenses for the goggles were used. After each run, subjects rated their anxiety level during the tasks on a Likert-type scale of 0 (none) to 10 (high).
We used a 3-T MRI system (Allegra; Siemens AG, Munich, Germany) to evaluate blood oxygenation level–dependent contrast using T2-weighted echoplanar imaging gradient-echo pulse sequence (repetition time, 2.5 seconds; echo time, 35 milliseconds; flip angle, 90°; acquisition matrix, 64 × 64 pixels; field of view, 24 × 24 cm; inplane voxel size, 3.75 × 3.75 mm; section thickness, 3 mm; 1-mm intervening spaces; and 28 total sections). There were 151 whole-brain images per subject per run and 302 whole-brain images per experiment. We also obtained high-resolution T1-weighted images for each subject to provide detailed brain anatomy during structural image acquisition.
For behavioral data, we used 2-way analysis of variance for reaction times and accuracy rates, with 1 group factor (BDD group vs controls) and 1 repeated-measures factor (task condition) to determine differences between groups. For anxiety levels, 2-sample t test was used to compare mean subjective anxiety scores between groups.
For functional neuroimaging data, we used software (fMRI Expert Analysis Tool version 5.4) from the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain Software Library (FSL) (http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl). Image processing included motion correction, skull stripping, spatial smoothing of 5-mm full width at half maximum gaussian kernel, mean-based intensity normalization of all volumes by the same factor, high-pass temporal filtering, and registration to standard space. We coregistered functional neuroimages of each subject to corresponding structural images in native space and registered structural images to structural Talairach and Tournoux standard images, approximated by the Montreal Neurological Institute standard brain supplied with FSL.
For within-group analyses, we performed a random-effects analysis in FSL with subjects as the random factor to identify typical patterns of brain activity in subjects with BDD and in control subjects. We modeled the hemodynamic response function by performing a simple convolution of the blocked experimental paradigms of each condition vs the control task using the canonical hemodynamic response function and its temporal derivative.37 To determine the patterns of activation in the BDD group and in the control group, we analyzed the normalized data with multiple regression by using 3 regressors to model hemodynamic changes associated with the HSF, LSF, and NSF tasks, each contrasted to the control task (matching ovals and circles) as follows: contrast 1, NSF vs control task; contrast 2, HSF vs control task; and contrast 3, LSF vs control task.
Model fitting generated whole-brain images in native space of parameter estimates and corresponding variance, representing the mean signal change during each particular contrast. We used the FSL Improved Linear Model for time-series statistical analysis, with local autocorrelation correction.38 We thresholded z score images using clusters determined by z > 2.0 and a (corrected) cluster significance threshold of P = .05.39
For between-group analyses, we directly compared the BDD and control groups using a voxelwise mixed-effects analysis in FSL. After we performed the within-group analyses, we used only stage 1 of the FSL Local Analysis of Mixed Effects.40,41 We thresholded z score images using clusters determined by z > 2.0 and a (corrected) cluster significance threshold of P = .05.39 A 2-sample paired t test identified group mean differences in activity at each voxel.
To investigate the relationship between symptom severity and regional brain activation, we entered results from the first-level (within group) analysis into a second-level analysis. In this analysis, demeaned BDD-YBOCS, HAMA, and HDRS scores were separate covariates of interest.
Table 1 summarizes the demographic and psychometric data for both groups. The mean ± SD BDD-YBOCS score was 28.7 ± 7.0. In addition to BDD, 1 subject had comorbid major depressive disorder, 1 had dysthymic disorder, 2 had generalized anxiety disorder, and 2 had both major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. The BDD symptoms were the primary concern in every subject. Typical of this population, all 12 subjects had preoccupations with perceived facial defects. Eight subjects had concerns solely about facial features, and 4 subjects had face and nonface concerns. Four subjects had concerns solely about details (skin blemishes, wrinkles, and others), and 8 subjects had concerns about both details and configuration (comparative size of features, shape, symmetry, and others). The mean ± SD subjective anxiety levels during the task were not statistically significantly different between the BDD group and the control group (3.83 ± 2.25 and 3.92 ± 1.68, respectively; P = .92).
Accuracy rates were high (Table 2). There were no statistically significant group effects (P =.31) or group × task effects (P = .72), although there was a statistically significant effect of task (P = .04).
For reaction times, there was no main effect of group (P = .86) or group × task (P = .40). Again, there was a statistically significant effect of task (P < .001) (Figure 3).
For all tasks, the subjects with BDD and the control subjects activated bilateral extrastriate visual cortex (Brodmann area [BA] 18) and bilateral fusiform gyrus.
For the HSF task, the BDD group also activated right inferior (BAs 44 and 45) and middle frontal (BA 45) gyri, as well as left inferior (BAs 44 and 47) and middle frontal (BA 9) gyri. There was also activation in bilateral hippocampi and parahippocampi, bilateral cingulate gyrus (BA 32), right inferior parietal lobule (BA 7), and right precuneus (BA 19). The control group also activated bilateral inferior (BAs 44 and 45) and middle frontal (BA 9) gyri. They activated bilateral hippocampi and parahippocampi, right cingulate (BA 32), right superior frontal gyri (BA 8), bilateral inferior parietal lobule (BA 7), and bilateral precuneus (BA 19).
For the LSF task, the BDD group activated the right inferior (BAs 44, 45, and 47) and middle (BA 9) frontal gyri. They also activated the left inferior (BAs 6 and 47) and middle (BAs 8 and 9) frontal gyri, as well as the left insula (BA 13). The control group activated the right inferior frontal gyrus (BAs 44, 45, and 46) and the right hippocampus.
For the NSF task, the BDD group activated bilateral inferior (BAs 44 and 45) and middle (BA 9) frontal gyri and the left precentral gyrus (BA 6). The control group activated the right inferior frontal gyrus (BAs 44 and 45).
For the HSF task, the BDD group showed statistically significant left middle (BA 21) and inferior (BA 37) temporal gyri activation relative to the control group (Table 3 and Figure 4). The control group did not demonstrate any regions of greater activation than the BDD group.
For the LSF task, the BDD group activated the left intraparietal sulcus (BA 40), the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44), and the left superior temporal gyrus (BA 22) to a greater degree than controls. They also activated right precentral (BA 6) and postcentral (BA 1) gyri, as well as the right superior (BA 8) and middle (BA 6) frontal gyri and bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate (BA 32) to a greater degree than controls (Table 3, Figure 4, and Figure 5). The control group again did not demonstrate any regions of greater activation compared with the BDD group.
For the NSF task, the BDD group activated the left superior temporal gyrus (BAs 22 and 38), the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 47), and the left insula to a greater degree than the control group (Table 3 and Figure 4). The control group showed greater activation of bilateral cuneus (BAs 18 and 19) and the left middle occipital gyrus (BA 19) (Table 4).
There were no statistically significant correlations between BDD-YBOCS, HAMA, or HDRS scores and activations in any regions.
The within-group activation maps indicated statistically significant bilateral amygdala activation for the NSF task for both groups. Because of its relevance for face processing and its small size, we performed a post hoc anatomical region-of-interest analysis of the amygdala to better characterize its activation pattern. Statistically significant activations included a mean ± SEM 0.61% ± 0.14% signal change in the BDD group vs a mean ± SEM −0.06% ± 0.15% signal change in the control group for the right amygdala for the LSF task (t = 3.26, P = .003; 2-sample t test, 2-tailed), as well as a mean ± SEM 0.53% ± 0.12% signal change in the BDD group vs a mean ± SEM −0.12% ± 0.23% signal change in the control group for the HSF task (t = 2.4, P = .03) (Figure 6). For the left amygdala, there were similar but statistically nonsignificant trends for the HSF (P = .08) and LSF (P = .14) tasks. Differences between groups for the NSF task were statistically nonsignificant for the right (P = .57) and left (P = .31) amygdala.
Correlation analyses revealed no statistically significant correlations between amygdala activity and subjective anxiety, BDD-YBOCS, HAMA, or HDRS scores.
These results suggest that subjects with BDD differ fundamentally from control subjects in their patterns of visual processing of faces. The BDD group demonstrated more left-sided activations in lateral aspects of the prefrontal and temporal cortices for all tasks, as well as dorsal anterior cingulate activity for the LSF task. The control group demonstrated this pattern only for the HSF task, suggesting that subjects with BDD use a similar network for processing NSH and LSF faces that control subjects use only for HSF faces. These laterality patterns suggest a bias for local, or detail, processing over global processing of faces for subjects with BDD. In addition, the BDD group showed abnormal activation of the amygdalae for HSF and LSF face tasks. We did not find differences in early ventral or dorsal visual stream regions as hypothesized; rather, the differences found are in regions that may represent later stages of visual processing or top-down effects.
A major difference in the BDD group relative to the control group was the predominance of left-sided activations in frontal, temporal, and parietal regions for all face tasks. This was evident for the within-group and between-group comparisons. Previous studies14,15 showed that a network of lateral prefrontal, temporal, and occipital regions is involved in face-matching tasks. Haxby et al,15 using a similar forced-choice face-matching task, found primarily right-sided inferior frontal gyrus activation, bilateral occipital activation, and bilateral ventral temporal activation (with more extensive right-sided activations).
In the present study, the control group demonstrated right predominance, while the BDD group demonstrated left-predominant activation patterns in lateral aspects of the middle and inferior prefrontal cortex for the LSF and NSF tasks. In general, the left hemisphere subserves analytic (or local) processing, while the right hemisphere dominates for holistic (or global) processing.43-45 These left prefrontal activations, recruited by control subjects only for the HSF faces, suggest that subjects with BDD were using a more detailed and piecemeal analysis for matching these face types. Conversely, the predominantly right-sided prefrontal activations for the control group suggest that they were processing more holistically or configurally for the LSF and NSF faces.46 These results are consonant with results from the neuropsychological study8 in BDD that found selective recall of details at the expense of configural elements for a nonface visuospatial task. Similar findings for the same task were demonstrated in OCD47 and in anorexia nervosa,42 suggesting a relationship between these disorders.
Other face-matching studies46,48-50 that have manipulated difficulty levels or introduced a working memory component have shown shifts in laterality from right to left in extended networks involved in face matching, interpreted as a change from a perceptually based processing strategy to one based more on elaboration and analytic encoding. However, because the present study was not specifically a working memory task, it remains speculative whether the BDD group was using similar cognitive strategies.
The greater activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus for the LSF task among the BDD group may be an indication of selective attention and modulation of activity in the extrastriate cortices.51 This suggests attempts to focus attention on details even for LSF faces.
Another finding of note is the BDD group's abnormal activation of bilateral amygdala for the LSF and HSF face tasks. In contrast, the control group showed bilateral activation of the amygdala for the NSF task but showed reduced activity or deactivation for the LSF and HSF tasks (Figure 6). Previous studies52,53 demonstrated that the amygdala responds to neutral facial expressions in addition to emotional faces. In the present study, subjects with BDD and control subjects rated their task-related anxiety as equally low, and anxiety did not correlate with amygdala activation. In addition, amygdala activation did not correlate with any symptom severity scores. We did not record emotional arousal or aversiveness ratings among participants for each face, as this was not specifically part of our a priori hypothesis. Because of this lack of behavioral data, the significance of the abnormal amygdalae activation is unclear, although it seems to be specific to HSF and LSF faces.
The only contrast in which the control subjects activated regions to a greater extent than the subjects with BDD was for the NSF faces. The control group demonstrated greater activation in the left middle occipital gyrus and bilateral cuneus, part of the primary and secondary visual cortex.
There were no statistically significant differences between the groups in reaction times or accuracy rates (Table 2 and Figure 3). The similarity in behavioral performance suggests that different brain activation patterns reflect different cognitive strategies between groups, producing the same end result.
There was a statistically significant effect of task, with the following order of reaction times: HSF, LSF, NSF, and control task. This is consonant with the observation that HSF information is processed more slowly than LSF information,54 and both are processed more slowly than NSF information.22
These findings likely have clinical correlates in patients with BDD. The finding of greater left hemisphere activations suggests that subjects with BDD may rely more on extraction and processing of details. Subjects with BDD may process faces in a piecemeal manner, while perception of faces by healthy control subjects may be more configural and holistic.
Clinically, patients with BDD often report honing in on details of their appearance features that they perceive are defective. They also frequently check appearance features of others to compare with their own.7 If they are less able to visualize faces holistically and configurally, their perception of appearance will remain different from that of others. Individuals with BDD may implicitly assume that everyone else is as detail biased as they are in their perception of appearance. This could contribute to the extreme self-consciousness and ideas of reference55 that they often experience. Future studies are important to test if the abnormalities that may underlie a detail bias found in this study also exist for processing subjects' own faces.
Another question that arises is whether abnormalities in visual processing among patients with BDD occur exclusively for faces or whether they may also be operating when processing nonhuman stimuli. Future studies would be important to test visual processing for objects (eg, to establish if these abnormalities are specific to faces or are generalized to other stimuli as well). This could help establish whether these visual processing abnormalities are occurring earlier in the visual processing stream or are associated with later top-down processing that may relate to allocation of attentional resources to pertinent appearance-related stimuli.
One of the limitations of this study was the small sample size. This may have resulted in insufficient power to detect smaller-magnitude differences in activations (eg, in occipital and fusiform regions). Another limitation in these subjects is the narrow range of severity of BDD, which likely did not provide enough variance to allow for a meaningful correlation analysis of symptom severity with brain activation. In addition, the absence of subjects' ratings of emotional valence for the faces hindered interpretation of the amygdala activation results. Future larger studies are needed that record emotional valence ratings for each task and that include subjects who have a range in severity from milder subsyndromal symptoms to severe BDD.
These results suggest that subjects with BDD may have fundamental abnormalities in an extended visual processing network. Because this experiment used others' faces and not subjects' own, these differences are not just limited to how patients with BDD process and perceive their own appearance. Abnormal visual processing represents an underlying pathophysiological process that may contribute to the symptoms in BDD. Additional research is important to further this line of inquiry for this little-studied disorder.
Correspondence: Jamie D. Feusner, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, 300 UCLA Medical Plaza, Ste 2345, Los Angeles, CA 90024 (email@example.com).
Submitted for Publication: September 29, 2006; final revision received June 25, 2007; accepted June 27, 2007.
Author Contributions: Dr Feusner had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Financial Disclosure: None reported.
Funding/Support: This study was funded by grant T32 MH17140 from the National Institute of Mental Health (Dr Feusner), by a grant from the Saban Family Foundation (Dr Bystritsky), by a donation from the Neysa Jane Body Dysmorphic Disorder Fund, Inc (Dr Feusner), and by grants RR12169, RR13642, and RR00865 from the National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health. The work was also supported by the Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, Brain Mapping Support Foundation, Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation, William M. and Linda R. Dietel Philanthropic Fund at the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation, Tamkin Foundation, Jennifer Jones-Simon Foundation, Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, Robson Family, and Northstar Fund.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Center for Research Resources or the National Institutes of Health.
Previous Presentation: This study was presented in part at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping; June 14, 2006; Florence, Italy.
Additional Contributions: Natalie Abrahami and Kristen Cooper assisted in preparation of the experimental face stimuli.


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The proposed regulations, considered by state officials to be the most stringent in the country, were announced on Friday in response to a law that Gov. Jerry Brown signed in September.
Companies would also be required to disclose the chemicals used and acquire permits before they start hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The rules go into effect in 2015, but there will be emergency regulations that companies would have to comply with beginning in January.
Fracking involves pumping huge amounts of water, sand and chemicals into deep rock formations to release oil or natural gas. Other well stimulation techniques use acid to break apart oil-rich formations. While the state oversees oil wells, there have not been specific rules for fracking, which has been going on for decades in California.
Some environmentalists contend the proposed rules don't go far enough and want a fracking ban until regulators can study whether there are risks to public health.
"We want a timeout," said Kathryn Phillips, state director of the Sierra Club told the Los Angeles Times in Saturday's editions.
"At best, these regulations can be described as a mixed bag," she said. "At worst, they provide another example of an agency's continued deference to a regulated entity, even at the expense of public health and the environment."
Other environmentalists said some oversight is better than none.
"There are some good provisions from our very preliminary review," Bill Allayaud of the Environmental Working Group told the newspaper.
Fracking supporters said the rules provide a framework to explore the Monterey Shale, vast formation that extends from California's Central Valley farmlands to offshore and could ultimately comprise two-thirds of the nation's shale oil reserves.
"These regulations are extensive but strike the right balance," Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, told the Times.
Under the draft rules, state environmental officials will team with air quality regulators and regional water boards to track potential problems after a job. Wells would also be monitored before and after fracking and some of the chemicals used to stimulate wells would be posted online.
State officials will hold a 60-day public comment period with hearings scheduled in several cities around the same.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Тэг 'Nature'
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Hidden truths permeate our world; they're inaccessible to our senses, but math allows us to go beyond our intuition to uncover their mysteries. In this survey of mathematical breakthroughs, Fields Medal winner Cédric Villani speaks to the thrill of discovery and details the sometimes perplexing life of a mathematician. "Beautiful mathematical explanations are not only
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190 008
A robot that runs and swims like a salamander
Roboticist Auke Ijspeert designs biorobots, machines modeled after real animals that are capable of handling complex terrain and would appear at home in the pages of a sci-fi novel. The process of creating these robots leads to better automata that can be used for fieldwork, service, and search and rescue. But these robots don't just mimic the natural world — they
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161 276
Photos from a storm chaser
Photographer Camille Seaman has been chasing storms for 5 years. In this talk she shows stunning, surreal photos of the heavens in tumult.
157 535
What separates us from chimpanzees?
Jane Goodall hasn't found the missing link, but she's come closer than nearly anyone else. The primatologist says the only real difference between humans and chimps is our sophisticated language. She urges us to start using it to change the world.
132 734
How to grow a tiny forest anywhere
A forest planted by humans, then left to nature's own devices, typically takes at least 100 years to mature. But what if we could make the process happen ten times faster? In this short talk, eco-entrepreneur (and TED Fellow) Shubhendu Sharma explains how to create a mini-forest ecosystem anywhere.
129 389
The world's oldest living things
Rachel Sussman shows photographs of the world's oldest continuously living organisms -- from 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago's coast to an "underground forest" in South Africa that has lived since before the dawn of agriculture.
126 012
What I learned from Nelson Mandela
"In the cathedral of the wild, we get to see the best parts of ourselves reflected back to us." Boyd Varty, a wildlife activist, shares stories of animals, humans and their interrelatedness, or "ubuntu" -- defined as, "I am, because of you." And he dedicates the talk to South African leader Nelson Mandela, the human embodiment of that same great-hearted,
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123 583
Biomimicry in action
Janine Benyus has a message for inventors: When solving a design problem, look to nature first. There you'll find inspired designs for making things waterproof, aerodynamic, solar-powered and more. Here she reveals dozens of new products that take their cue from nature with spectacular results.
122 457
The unexpected beauty of everyday sounds
Using examples from birdsong, the natural lilt of emphatic language and even a cooking pan lid, singer-songwriter and TED Fellow Meklit Hadero shows how the everyday soundscape, even silence, makes music. "The world is alive with musical expression," she says. "We are already immersed."
117 619
This computer will grow your food in the future
What if we could grow delicious, nutrient-dense food, indoors anywhere in the world? Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, wants to change the food system by connecting growers with technology. Get to know Harper's "food computers" and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.
116 067
How trees talk to each other
"A forest is much more than what you see," says ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her 30 years of research in Canadian forests have led to an astounding discovery — trees talk, often and over vast distances. Learn more about the harmonious yet complicated social lives of trees and prepare to see the natural world with new eyes.
111 007
Are mushrooms the new plastic?
Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new, fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture, plasma screens -- and the environment.
103 790
Buildings that blend nature and city
A skyscraper that channels the breeze ... a building that creates community around a hearth ... Jeanne Gang uses architecture to build relationships. In this engaging tour of her work, Gang invites us into buildings large and small, from a surprising local community center to a landmark Chicago skyscraper. "Through architecture, we can do much more than create
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84 339
Shh! Sound health in 8 steps
Julian Treasure says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health -- even costing lives. He lays out an 8-step plan to soften this sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) and restore our relationship with sound.
82 385
Design at the intersection of technology and biology
Designer and architect Neri Oxman is leading the search for ways in which digital fabrication technologies can interact with the biological world. Working at the intersection of computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering and synthetic biology, her lab is pioneering a new age of symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, our products and
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82 319
The voice of the natural world
Bernie Krause has been recording wild soundscapes -- the wind in the trees, the chirping of birds, the subtle sounds of insect larvae -- for 45 years. In that time, he has seen many environments radically altered by humans, sometimes even by practices thought to be environmentally safe. A surprising look at what we can learn through nature's symphonies, from
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76 380
Ross Lovegrove shares organic designs
Designer Ross Lovegrove expounds his philosophy of "fat-free" design and offers insight into several of his extraordinary products, including the Ty Nant water bottle and the Go chair.
66 540
Dive into an ocean photographer's world
Somersaulting manta rays, dashing dolphins, swarming schools of fish and munching sharks inhabit a world beneath the ocean's surface that few get a chance to see. Conservation photographer Thomas Peschak visits incredible seascapes around the world, and his photos reveal these hidden ecosystems. "You can't love something and become a champion for it if you don't know
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54 223
A forgotten Space Age technology could change how we grow food
We're heading for a world population of 10 billion people — but what will we all eat? Lisa Dyson rediscovered an idea developed by NASA in the 1960s for deep-space travel, and it could be a key to reinventing how we grow food.
50 499
Using nature to grow batteries
Inspired by an abalone shell, Angela Belcher programs viruses to make elegant nanoscale structures that humans can use. Selecting for high-performing genes through directed evolution, she's produced viruses that can construct powerful new batteries, clean hydrogen fuels and record-breaking solar cells. At TEDxCaltech, she shows us how it's done.
50 401
Humble plants that hide surprising secrets
In this intriguing talk, biologist Ameenah Gurib-Fakim introduces us to rare plant species from isolated islands and regions of Africa. Meet the shape-shifting benjoin; the baume de l'ile plate, which might offer a new treatment for asthma; and the iconic baobab tree, which could hold the key to the future of food. Plus: monkey apples.
49 652
Exposing the invisible
Nick Veasey shows outsized X-ray images that reveal the otherworldly inner workings of familiar objects -- from the geometry of a wildflower to the anatomy of a Boeing 747. Producing these photos is dangerous and painstaking, but the reward is a superpower: looking at what the human eye can't see.
48 985
Matthew Childs' 9 life lessons from rock climbing
In this talk from TED University 2009, veteran rock climber Matthew Childs shares nine pointers for rock climbing. These handy tips bear on an effective life at sea level, too.
38 287
Why I love vultures
As natural garbage collectors, vultures are vital to our ecosystem -- so why all the bad press? Why are so many in danger of extinction? Raptor biologist Munir Virani says we need to pay more attention to these unique and misunderstood creatures, to change our perception and save the vultures.
33 541
Sculpting waves in wood and time
Reuben Margolin is a kinetic sculptor, crafting beautiful pieces that move in the pattern of raindrops falling and waves combining. Take nine minutes and be mesmerized by his meditative art -- inspired in equal parts by math and nature.
30 901
Richard Preston on the giant trees
Science writer Richard Preston talks about some of the most enormous living beings on the planet, the giant trees of the US Pacific Northwest. Growing from a tiny seed, they support vast ecosystems -- and are still, largely, a mystery.
26 985
Eric Sanderson pictures New York -- before the City
400 years after Hudson found New York harbor, Eric Sanderson shares how he made a 3D map of Mannahatta's fascinating pre-city ecology of hills, rivers, wildlife -- accurate down to the block -- when Times Square was a wetland and you couldn't get delivery.
26 506
The ethical dilemma of designer babies
Creating genetically modified people is no longer a science fiction fantasy; it's a likely future scenario. Biologist Paul Knoepfler estimates that within fifteen years, scientists could use the gene editing technology CRISPR to make certain "upgrades" to human embryos — from altering physical appearances to eliminating the risk of auto-immune diseases. In this
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21 608
Life science in prison
Nalini Nadkarni challenges our perspective on trees and prisons -- she says both can be more dynamic than we think. Through a partnership with the state of Washington, she brings science classes and conservation programs to inmates, with unexpected results.
15 944
How the market can keep streams flowing
With streams and rivers drying up because of over-usage, Rob Harmon has implemented an ingenious market mechanism to bring back the water. Farmers and beer companies find their fates intertwined in the intriguing century-old tale of Prickly Pear Creek.
8 327
a plea for bees
Bees are dying in droves. Why? Leading apiarist Dennis vanEngelsdorp looks at the gentle, misunderstood creature's important place in nature and the mystery behind its alarming disappearance.
8 290
Math is the hidden secret to understanding the world
Unlock the mysteries and inner workings of the world through one of the most imaginative art forms ever — mathematics — with Roger Antonsen, as he explains how a slight change in perspective can reveal patterns, numbers and formulas as the gateways to empathy and understanding.
6 789
How to grow a forest in your backyard
Forests don't have to be far-flung nature reserves, isolated from human life. Instead, we can grow them right where we are — even in cities. Eco-entrepreneur and TED Fellow Shubhendu Sharma grows ultra-dense, biodiverse mini-forests of native species in urban areas by engineering soil, microbes and biomass to kickstart natural growth processes. Follow along as he
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4 185
A simple way to break a bad habit
Can we break bad habits by being more curious about them? Psychiatrist Judson Brewer studies the relationship between mindfulness and addiction — from smoking to overeating to all those other things we do even though we know they're bad for us. Learn more about the mechanism of habit development and discover a simple but profound tactic that might help you beat your
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4 071
Unseen footage, untamed nature
At TED2012, filmmaker Karen Bass shares some of the astonishing nature footage she's shot for the BBC and National Geographic -- including brand-new, previously unseen footage of the tube-lipped nectar bat, who feeds in a rather unusual way …
1 871
Drawings that show the beauty and fragility of Earth
Zaria Forman's large-scale compositions of melting glaciers, icebergs floating in glassy water and waves cresting with foam explore moments of transition, turbulence and tranquility. Join her as she discusses the meditative process of artistic creation and the motivation behind her work. "My drawings celebrate the beauty of what we all stand to lose," she says. "I
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1 048
3 moons and a planet that could have alien life
Is there life beyond Earth? Join NASA's director of planetary science James Green for a survey of the places in our solar system that are most likely to harbor alien life.
How we're growing baby corals to rebuild reefs
Kristen Marhaver studies corals, tiny creatures the size of a poppyseed that, over hundreds of slow years, create beautiful, life-sustaining ocean structures hundreds of miles long. As she admits, it's easy to get sad about the state of coral reefs; they're in the news lately because of how quickly they're bleaching, dying and turning to slime. But the good news is
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What will humans look like in 100 years?
We can evolve bacteria, plants and animals — futurist Juan Enriquez asks: Is it ethical to evolve the human body? In a visionary talk that ranges from medieval prosthetics to present day neuroengineering and genetics, Enriquez sorts out the ethics associated with evolving humans and imagines the ways we'll have to transform our own bodies if we hope to explore and
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What the discovery of gravitational waves means
More than a billion years ago, two black holes in a distant galaxy locked into a spiral, falling inexorably toward each other, and collided. "All that energy was pumped into the fabric of time and space itself," says theoretical physicist Allan Adams, "making the universe explode in roiling waves of gravity." About 25 years ago, a group of scientists built a giant
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How I turned a deadly plant into a thriving business
The water hyacinth may look like a harmless, even beautiful flowering plant — but it's actually an invasive aquatic weed that clogs waterways, stopping trade, interrupting schooling and disrupting everyday life. In this scourge, green entrepreneur Achenyo Idachaba saw opportunity. Follow her journey as she turns weeds into woven wonders.
How early life experience is written into DNA
Moshe Szyf is a pioneer in the field of epigenetics, the study of how living things reprogram their genome in response to social factors like stress and lack of food. His research suggests that biochemical signals passed from mothers to offspring tell the child what kind of world they're going to live in, changing the expression of genes. "DNA isn't just a sequence of
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The taboo secret to healthier plants and people
Our poop and pee have superpowers, but for the most part we don't harness them. Molly Winter faces down our squeamishness and asks us to see what goes down the toilet as a resource, one that can help fight climate change, spur innovation and even save us money.
What you need to know about CRISPR
Should we bring back the wooly mammoth? Or edit a human embryo? Or wipe out an entire species that we consider harmful? The genome-editing technology CRISPR has made extraordinary questions like these legitimate — but how does it work? Scientist and community lab advocate Ellen Jorgensen is on a mission to explain the myths and realities of CRISPR, hype-free, to the
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What a driverless world could look like
What if traffic flowed through our streets as smoothly and efficiently as blood flows through our veins? Transportation geek Wanis Kabbaj thinks we can find inspiration in the genius of our biology to design the transit systems of the future. In this forward-thinking talk, preview exciting concepts like modular, detachable buses, flying taxis and networks of suspended
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The next step in nanotechnology
Every year the silicon computer chip shrinks in size by half and doubles in power, enabling our devices to become more mobile and accessible. But what happens when our chips can't get any smaller? George Tulevski researches the unseen and untapped world of nanomaterials. His current work: developing chemical processes to compel billions of carbon nanotubes to assemble
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Clues to prehistoric times, found in blind cavefish
TED Fellow Prosanta Chakrabarty explores hidden parts of the world in search of new species of cave-dwelling fish. These subterranean creatures have developed fascinating adaptations, and they provide biological insights into blindness as well as geological clues about how the continents broke apart million of years ago. Contemplate deep time in this short talk.
Before Avatar ... a curious boy
James Cameron's big-budget (and even bigger-grossing) films create unreal worlds all their own. In this personal talk, he reveals his childhood fascination with the fantastic -- from reading science fiction to deep-sea diving -- and how it ultimately drove the success of his blockbuster hits "Aliens," "The Terminator," "Titanic" and "Avatar."
Mathieu Lehanneur demos science-inspired design
Naming science as his chief inspiration, Mathieu Lehanneur shows a selection of his ingenious designs -- an interactive noise-neutralizing ball, an antibiotic course in one layered pill, asthma treatment that reminds kids to take it, a living air filter, a living-room fish farm and more.
Art made of the air we breathe
Emily Parsons-Lord re-creates air from distinct moments in Earth's history — from the clean, fresh-tasting air of the Carboniferous period to the soda-water air of the Great Dying to the heavy, toxic air of the future we're creating. By turning air into art, she invites us to know the invisible world around us. Breathe in the Earth's past and future in this
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text:
Cherry Blossom
by Thiago Bols
Original Acrylic on Board
Size 36″ x 24″ Approx
Artist Thiago Bols paints beautiful Black women.
Bols makes paper mache which is a composite material consisting of paper pieces or pulp, sometimes reinforced with textiles, bound with an adhesive, such as glue.
Thiago molds and then adheres his paper mache to the canvas in various shapes.
Using acrylic paint and fabric the artist completes his composition.
Thiago Almeida Santos (Thiago Bols) has a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Federal University of Bahia and acts as producer, art director, make up artist and costume designer for shows in Salvador, Bahia.


text:
In the spring of 1996, Museum staff launched a project to trace the fate of the 937 passengers of the St. Louis after they were dispersed to England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the summer of 1939. The results of this effort can be viewed in several ways from this page.
Passengers can be searched by name, or by country of disembarkation (Belgium, England, France, The Netherlands, Cuba). The Passenger list presents all 937 passengers (a non-searchable list, displaying the names as they appeared in 1939).
The information presented here will be updated as more is learned. Inquiries or information about specific passengers may be addressed to firstname.lastname@example.com.
For the story behind the research undertaken to trace all of the passengers' experiences, including some detailed narratives of individuals and families, see Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust by Sarah A. Ogilvie and Scott Miller, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. REFUGE DENIED: THE ST. LOUIS PASSENGERS AND THE HOLOCAUST (Museum Shop).


text:
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October 07, 2007
Claude Lanzman's Shoah: Key Essays. A Review
Daniel Libeskind on his Berlin Jewish Museum project representing absence:
The third aspect of this project was my interest in the names of those persons who were deported from Berlin during the fatal years of the Holocaust. I asked for and received from Bonn two very large volumes called the 'Gedenkbuch'. They are incredibly impressive because all they contain are names, just lists and lists of names, dates of birth, dates of deportation and presumed places where these people were murdered. I looked for the names of the Berliners and where they had died - in Riga, in the Lodz ghetto, in the concentration camps.
Claude Lanzman's Shoah: Key Essays. Edited by Stuart Liebman, Oxford University Press: 2007
Shoah is available from Masters of Cinema @ Eureka Video
The publication of this book this year is a timely one coming not long after the Eureka release of Shoah on DVD. There is increasing interest at an academic level in representations of the Holocaust (Shoah) / and the Nazi Concentration Camp & Death Camp systems as a whole. The latter is well represented by another book of essays edited by van der Knaap "Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog" published by Wallflower Press in 2006 which will be reviewed in due course. Originally I was going to review them together but on reading them both I decided both deserve their own space particularly in the light of the argument of Shoah and the discourses surrounding it which make the case for highlighting the attempted eradication of European Jewry as an act which isn't as yet taken fully into account by the majority of European countries. The argument of Shoah is that it is a crime which is on a scale which outweighs the other horrors committed by the Nazi precisely because of its specificity and the corresponding doubt which it which it created in relation to the future and nature of humanity itself. Lanzmann himself describes it as : "Their extermination is a crime of a different nature, of a different quality; it is a nameless crime, which the Nazi assassins themselves dared not name, as if by doing so they would have made it impossible to enact. It was literally an unnameable crime." (Lanzmann in Liebman, 2007p 28).
This book of essays covers an interesting range of ideas, perspectives and reactions. These range from articles like Gertrude Koch's which are highly academic to the experience of how the distribution of Shoah was arranged in the United States to ensure the widest possible audience in a country where Hollywood output and the corresponding cine-machine rules out the exhibition of 9 ½ hour films. Given the range of different discourses which have emerged directly from the film it is difficult to give a clear overview of the disparate ideas which cohere in the field of Shoah. The fact that they do so bears witness to the power and integrity of Shoah itself. Even defining exactly what the film is difficult because its approach certainly redefines the idea of what a documentary is, indeed it is sen by Lanzmann as a performance.
I will therefore comment upon several of the essays which hopefully will attract the reader interest this book deserves and by inference encourage people to view the film itself for otherwise much of what is written remains largely meaningless. I have covered many of the points made by Stuart Leibman in his introduction in the first part of the expanded review of Shoah elsewhere on this blog. It is a powerful piece and is available in an abbreviated version with the Eureka DVD of Shoah. This book is thus an extension of the film and is the next place the viewer should go to deepen the viewing experience further.
The book is split into three parts. The first deals with its inception through production and distribution. The second section is comprised of appreciations, close readings and celebrations. The final section is called 'Controversies and Critiques'. I have chosen two essays out section 1 and one out od the other two sections. All are useful essays and also accessible to the lay reader in ways which more specific essays such as Gertrude Koch's about aesthetics are not. I have decide to deal with the essay Closely Watched Trains by Marcel Ophuls who made the powerful documentary about The Sorrow and The Pity which was very controversial because it attacked the mythology which surrounded the Gaullist construction of resistance and in part dealt with the role of the Vichy in collaborating with Nazism in the Holocaust. An interview with Lanzmann himself by Chevrie and Le Roux working for Cahiers de Cinema comes next. Daniel Talbot's article about the distribution of Shoah shows the importance of the power of distribution in the chain of cinema itself as well as providing a moving account of committed engagement to ensure that it was seen, against the odds. Finally I have chosen a very interesting essay on gender issues and Shoah written by Hirsch and Spitzer both professors at Columbia University.
Closely Watched Trains: Marcel Ophuls
I simply had to read this essay early on partially because of the obvious link between Shoah and Different Trains by Steve Reich. Somehow it is the trains which come to symbolise the depth of organisation and also the depth of collusion in with the Holocaust. The eerie rhythm of the trains running on a parallel but unseen and unacknowledged timetable of eradication, an industrialised death machine feeding the Moloch which is presaged in Lang's Metropolis is a sort of haunting embedded into the film. Here it is worth focusing on Lanzmann's basic premise which he seeks to expose through his film.
Whilst Siegfried Kracauer can be accused of being teleological in his analysis of German cinema representing the almost inevitable path of Germany's fall into Nazism there are strong anti-Semitic strands which can be discerned within Weimar cinema itself such as Nosferatu. Certainly there was a powerful structure of anti-Semitic feeling in Germany itself. This upholds Lanzmann's idea that the Holocaust was not an aberration. It relied on: firstly "the basic consensus of the German nation" (remember the massive resistance against forced of disabled euthanasia was partially successful); secondly, it "relied on the existence of an aggressively anti Semitic world: Poland, Hungary, Romania, the USSR not to mention others." (Lanzmann p 31) [self-explanatory and historically accurate]; thirdly, it was also made possible because "nations washed their hands of the Jewish persecution". Countries such as Britain neither stood up firmly enough for the Jews of Germany nor did they rush to the rescue Lanzmann cites Lord Moyne High Commissioner in Egypt referring to the possibility to take in 1 million Hungarian Jews "what am I to do with 1 million Jews" (p32).
Ophuls puts his finger on the pulse of Lanzmann's film instantaneously:
How can the unspeakable horror, the memories of total evil and complete degradation that the survivors themselves feel cannot be communicated, be forced back into the collective awareness, into the conscience of mankind." (Ophuls in Liebman p 77).
Ophuls is very honest about his immediate reactions to being asked to watch Shoah. He states that he generally dislikes documentaries for reasons ranging from the hi-jacking of a popular art form 'the movies' into the service of a cause to the fact that he doesn't trust the makers of these who often defend the form under the aura of a bourgeois respectability. However having experienced it he openly states that he considers "Shoah to be the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made, bar none, and by far the greatest film I've ever seen about the Holocaust".
Ophuls focuses on the issue of whether the film can be deemed to be 'anti-Polish' a reaction from the Polish authorities at the time the film came out. As Ophuls points out Lanzmann expected to find non participating witnesses to the arrival of the trains, to the herding of Jews into gas chambers:
"That some of the farmers profess compassion while obviously contemplating every detail of the proceedings with barely concealed relish is not the director's invention. " (p 81)
Ophuls also points out the toughness of Lanzmann's exposure of the true underlying process. In response to the comments of a reviewer called Murat who at times thought Lanzmann a 'benevolent torturer' who he wanted to 'reach out and slap', Ophuls is scathing:
If being a gentleman is a documentary filmmaker's top priority he'd better get into some other line of work." Lanzmann he notes attempts no charm or ingratiation of the audience. However as Ophuls points out correctly there is no 'intimidated awe' which is an approach with which people usually approach the Holocaust and is an approach which Lanzmann is entirely counterpoised to.
Ophuls praise the subterfuge which Lanzmann at times resorts to when interviewing some executioners. Criminals are 'outed' why should one be critical of this? He asks rhetorically. A more effective justice system would have / should have dealt these people a far harsher hand.
Ophuls tries to attenuate Lanzmann's critique of the TV series 'The Holocaust' which was broadcast in the states. For Lanzmann it was rather pusillanimous to say the least. Effectively He ended up being on the same side as nationalistic Germans who were doing their best to stop it being broadcast in Germany at the time. Ophuls makes an interesting and important point when he comments the Edgar Reitz's Heimat coming in at around 16 hours 'was a deliberate effort to defend the memories of his childhood against the foreign invasion of Holocaust'. Then Ophuls has a swipe at several directors not renowned for their right-wing ideals. Fassbinder's Lilli Marlene he describes as 'neo-fascist indulgence' and Pontecorvo's (maker of the Battle of Algiers) Kapo he describes as 'crass voyeurism'. I'll bear those comments in mind when I get to see the latter. The former I can barely remember but it didn't strike me as neo-fascist at the time.
Finally Ophuls identifies with Lanzmann's filming experience the moral catastrophe he has found in his filming in places like Latin America which is "murderous indifference". With Lanzmann says Ophuls
Beyond the urge to persuade, and even the need to testify, I suspect that a new state of mind has come to guide and sustain this magnificent achievement: not resignation but defiance!" (p 87).
Site & Speech: an interview with Claude Lanzmann by Cahiers du Cinema
This interview opens with a prelude where Lanzmann declares that he wishes to talk about the film as a film. In the interview which takes place in 1984 he talks about a book which he will bring out on Shoah commenting that:
Certain people…… are so overwhelmed by the horror that they develop a kind of sacred and religious attitude towards it and do not see the film itself. One has to understand why and how this horror is transmitted. (Liebman p 37)
The interview proper starts with a straightforward question about how the project began in the first place. Lanzmann started out by reading a lot about the Holocaust as well as going through photo archives. He faced a fundamental problem when he needed to ask for money to make the film. The problem is the Catch 22 of making cinema and being reliant upon commercial production practices. Unsurprisingly he was always asked "what is your conception of the film". Lanzmann comments that this was: … the most absurd question: I did not have any conception. Initially Lanzmann comments that he proceeded to collect theoretical knowledge he then started to find witnesses specifically "those who had been in the charnel houses of the extermination" (ibid p 38). It was when interviewing these witnesses that Lanzmann discovered:
…an absolute gap between the bookish knowledge I had acquired and what these people told me. I understood nothing. (ibid p 38)
This is already an effective underpinning of qualitative research methods and begins to highlight his unusual methods. At times they come close to a psychoanalytic method. Lanzmann discovered that a core problem for his film making was that the experiences the survivors had undergone were so extreme that they couldn't communicate anything. Lanzmann discovered that a sense of place, a sort of geography of extermination, was required to start to make sense of the whole un-representable process. By visiting core sites of the extermination he discovered a sort of dialectic of cognition: one needed to know to see, and to see to know:
If you go to Auschwitz without knowing anything about Auschwitz and the history of the camp, you will see nothing. In the same way, if you know without having been there, you will also not understand anything. (ibid p38).
Lanzmann clearly states that the film is about site, about topography and about geography. Because there was a process of effacement of sites like Treblinka the places were becoming sites of non-memory. Accordingly Lanzmann had models made of the gas chamber at Treblinka moving from the landscape to this model when he was shooting in order to imbue the film with a sense of power created through the act of connectivity.
At this point in the interview Lanzmann is very scathing about the American TV series produced in the early 1980s called Holocaust which he accuses of being idealist. Here one is reminded of the concern voiced by Ophuls as discussed above.
There are many ways to communicate and many different levels of communication. Like Ophuls I would argue that productions like Holocaust have their place especially in education because they can allow some critical space to open up for new audiences.
Another comment made by the Cahiers interviewers was that the film was made "in the face of its own impossibility". For Lanzmann the film was especially problematic to make because of the disappearance of the traces of the extermination and also because of the sheer impossibility of getting survivors to speak about it because of the un-nameability of the whole process of extermination.
The Lack of Archival Images
Contrary to some opinions the programme for the extermination of the Jews was not visually archived meticulously by the Nazis as Lanzmann points out the situation was quite the opposite. There is almost nothing:
About the extermination strictly speaking there is nothing. For very simple reasons it was categorically forbidden… the problem of getting rid of the traces was therefore crucial in every respect. (p 40).
At this point Lanzmann goes into some important aspects of film and documentary film making for even if there had been archival materials available he would not have used them:
I don't like the voiceover commenting on the images or photographs as if it were the voice of institutional knowledge that does not surge directly from what one sees; and one does not have the right to explain to the spectator what he must understand… That is why I decided from very early on that there would be no archival documents in the film" (My emphasis p 40).
Here there is an important argument made for Lanzmann's artistic method for instead of being set in the present the film "forces the imagination to work". Lanzmann's method became more akin to a sort of psychoanalytic method of reliving the traumatic experience so the one could speak it, where "speak" can sometimes mean body actions and non-verbal communications. For example, relating his experience with the barber when he placed the barber in a real barber's shop with a real customer.
And from this moment on, truth became incarnate, and as he relived the scene, his knowledge became carnal. It is a film about the incarnation of truth." (p. 40).
Framing and Mise en Scene
At this point the Cahiers interviewers discuss the issue of mise en scene and its inter-relationship with the methods so that form and method can be seen as entirely intertwined. The interviewers suggest that truth doesn't emerge from archival images rather it emerges from a restaging of events and practices. Lanzmann explains how he rented the trains which became so symbolically powerful within the film. The boxcars at Treblinka station were actually the same ones that were used at the time. Here the underlying philosophy driving his method clearly emerges. By getting into the boxcars and filming:
The distance between past and present was abolished, and everything became real for me. The real is opaque; it is the true configuration of the impossible." (p. 42).
It was only during the making of the film that Lanzmann became fully aware of the importance of site. When he initially visited Poland Lanzmann didn't know what he wanted from the visit. He had arrived with the notion that Poland was a, "non-site of memory", and that this history had been diasporized". (p43)
It was when Lanzmann was in Poland that he noticed that the Polish people who had been witnesses to much of the extermination began to speak of their experiences: I perceived that it was very alive in their conscious's, that scars had not yet formed". As a result Lanzmann set about filming these witnesses without telling them what he was going to be filming in advance. When he filmed one of the train conductors who had helped to transport the Jews Lanzmann put him into the cab of the railway engine he had rented and told him they were going to film the arrival at Treblinka. It was on arrival at Treblinka that:
…he made this unbelievable gesture at his throat while looking at the imaginary boxcars (behind the locomotive of course there were no boxcars). Compared to this image archived photographs became unbearable. This image has become what is true. Subsequently when I filmed the peasants, they all made this gesture, which they said was a warning, but it was really a sadistic gesture." (p 43)
For Lanzmann this became a cinematic method which meant that Shoah became a film that was fictional but deeply "rooted in reality". In this way it crosses the boundary between fact and fiction just as it crosses the temporal boundary between past and present. It was a method in which they had to act out "they had to give themselves over to it ". (p. 44). It was through this method that speech communications thus came to carry an extra charge going beyond the talking heads approach of more conventional documentary making. The film thus becomes a "reliving of history in the present"(p. 45)
Some Polish witnesses.
The Distribution of Shoah in the USA
I found the chapter on distribution and exhibition of Shoah in the independent sector particularly interesting. Even though films by their nature are slightly less 'prisoners of measured time' than TV, there are clearly defined norms beyond which distributors and exhibitors will not go. Both arms of the industry are concerned with reducing risk as much as possible. In this type of climate being an art form comes a poor second. Great films of the past have suffered at the hands of industry manipulation such as Lang's Metropolis and Visconti's The Leopard. What would happen then to a nine & a half film made with no stars and by a little known director? Shoah can hardly be said to be a genre which has mass audience appeal either. Daniel Talbot's methods were inventive and original and had everything with the film being so successful in the USA.
Daniel Talbot became responsible for distributing Shoah in the USA nevertheless he made a success of the task and became so convinced by the film that about six months after opening Shoah he thought about abandoning film distribution altogether : …for everything after this film would be anti-climactic, trivial, depressingly boring. (p 53).
Talbot and his wife went to Paris to view the film with a proven record of successful distribution of European 'Art House' movies in the USA. They immediately signed a deal and ordered one 35mm subtitled print. These prints were of course very expensive at around $15,000 each a lot back in the early 1980s. Talbot needed to connect intimately with his target audience which was the American Jewish population. Initially he screened the film for Lucjan Dobroszycki an important
Talbot had taken over a small cinema in 1976 splitting into 300 seat and 185 seat theatres which had built up a regular clientele of more arts oriented New Yorkers. Talbot opened the film and Lanzmann came over to speak. It had enormous critical success with the exception of Pauline Kael. The film ran for six months playing to an older audience than usual. As a result of this initial success Talbot generated a lot of interest and started to publicise it more widely and launch specific marketing initiatives. He invested in another 6 prints reinvesting the proceeds of the six month run.
Of course he still needed to develop a different distribution strategy which didn't follow the normal pattern of NY followed by LA and then other large regional cities. With only six prints available Talbot chose to target the cities with large Jewish populations. He was also faced with the problem of not being able to afford long runs because of the wear and tear on the print and the enormous expense of replacing them. Talbot thus pursed a strategy of offsetting risk onto the exhibitor. Exhibitors were carefully chosen on the strength of them being able to attract a strong Jewish audience. The exhibitors also only had two weeks in which to make a profit and the film was sold to them at a high $20,000 flat rate. In return Talbot allowed them to raise money from the films for local Jewish charities. Lanzmann again came over to speak about the film visiting many American cities. Overall the film played in over 100 cities.
This huge success for a film which seemed unmarketable led to a campaign to get the film onto the PBS TV Network This required them to raise $1.5 million. Fortunately they were supported by many very wealthy backers which allowed them to meet the target. As a result over 10 million saw the film on TV. Hitler's attempts to erase the Jewish people from history were thus entirely defeated.
Gendered Translations
Hirsch and Spitzer make a very useful critical contribution to the discourses surrounding the film and by doing so very firmly put issues of gender very firmly on the map of the Holocaust. They start from a position which notes how myriad reports of the Holocaust have managed to de-gendered the history. The dehumanising language of the perpetrators usually talks not of bodies but of "figures and junk". Descriptions of the transportation of Jews across Europe resorts to clichés about being packed like Sardines, after being murdered they are laid out in mass graves 'like herrings'. Jews become a 'load' in the train wagons. Whilst this use of language is dehumanising it also strips out all reference to difference. Hirsch and Spitzer thus comment:
"Ironically Lanzmann's film itself also eradicates gender differences among the victims of the "Final Solution"'. (P 176).
In the film the experience of the Jewish women is represented by others and women survivors only appear fleetingly. Perhaps surprisingly there are a number of witnesses amongst the Polish and Germans interviewed who are women:
But among the Jewish survivors who speak and give their account in the film, the erasure of difference and particularly, the almost complete absence of women are striking". (P 177).
They comment that for Lanzmann that gender is irrelevant to the death machine which is designed specifically to de-gender, declass and dehumanise and then destroy the traces.
Lanzmann therefore backgrounds the subjective experience of the victims. Yet they note that in other accounts of the Holocaust significant gender differences do emerge where:
… women speak of the effects of ceasing to menstruate and the fear that their fertility would never return, they speak of rape, sexual humiliation, sexual exchange, abuse, enforced abortions and the necessity of killing their own and other women's babies.(P 177).
For Hirsch and Spitzer it is clear that the extermination selection process meant that maternity was a greater liability than paternity so they argue that the focus and method used by Lanzmann does enact an erasure of women 'however', they comment, "…traces of gender difference are nonetheless re-inscribed in his film." They took as their task in this article to job differences making the gendered translation described by the title of the article.
Most of the women such as Paula Biren disappear after a brief interview unlike the male survivors. Only one women ain the film goes through Lanzmann's methods of "reliving" of "experiencing in the present". This was Inge Deutschkron who returns to
At this stage Hirsch and Spitzer point out that Shoah's equalisation of difference "extends to the realm of morality as well." Here we are dealing with what Primo Levi described as a 'moral grey zone'. This can be applied to those Jews who survived because they became Kapos and participated in work details. Lanzmann avoids dealing with the implications of this participation. Although differences in testimony appear, differences in experiences are downplayed.
The highly gendered approach which has been identified in Lanzmann's work perhaps reflects the gendered nature of Judaism itself. Hirsch and Spitzer comment on the reports in the film about Jewish leaders during the Holocaust Freddy Hirsch and Czerniziow who by committing suicide:
"…act out the masculine response to the realisation that there is no future left."
This is a privileging of a male perspective within the film. By comparison Shoah only deals very briefly with the suicide of female suicide, yet the women's suicides seem less self-centred than the men's:
"For these women death is an act of final resistance: escape for themselves and their offspring from prolonged suffering at the hands of their oppressors." (P 184).
Hirsch & Spitzer then proceed to argue that in Shoah the double position which women have in societies observed in a cross-cultural way - citing the anthropologist Maurice Bloch- has been reduced. This double position is one of representing both death and generativity:
"The feminine connection to generativity, is eradicated, which seems to make the first connection to destruction doubly terrifying. Within the context of the film women come to represent death without regeneration." (p 184).
This insight leads them to re-examine events in terms of the Greek myth of Orpheus. On this reading Shoah is composed of a 'bearing witness' from inside hell or Hades in a way which is redolent of Orpheus. In the myth he has a hauntingly beautiful voice and he also leaves a woman behind. To develop this insight they turn to the work of Klaus Theweleit which examines Orphic creation as a form of false creativity. Thus the creativity of the Jewish survivors creating a range of institutions is an artificial 'birth'. In the Orpheus myth women play the role of 'media' the intermediaries acting as voices and translators not as primary creators or witnesses. They argue that in Shoah it is Lanzmann and his male participants who give birth to a story which never should have been heard:
"In a modern manifestation of Orphic creation, together with these "Orphic" male survivors of the journey to Hell, Lanzmann circumvents women and mothers and initiates and new form of transmission for modern Jewish history". (p 186).
The daughter of a survivor mediated so that her father would speak the unspeakable.
By relying on the women in Shoah who can virtually not be seen the process of inquiry – the methods – become a gendered translation – of events. Women in Shoah remain, " … shadowy intermediary voices between language and silence, between what is articulated and what must remain unspeakable." (p 186).
Hirsch and Spitzer also make another link to mythic structure of Shoah in relation to Medusa who:
"calls into question the very act of looking: to look is to be possessed, to lose oneself, to find oneself pulled into the absolute alterity of death. In that sense Medusa is the figure most endangering for cinema, especially for the cinematic evocation and representation of death." (p 187)
They note that Lanzmann insists that his film is a performance not a documentary but "women are left out of these remarkable performances." They conclude correctly that Lanzmann's film has succeeded in bearing witness to the – event –without – witness, but that it erases the difference between past and present and that it has the mythic and artistic force of Orphic creation whilst revealing the politics of this mythology 'by replicating the sacrifice of Eurydice and the slaying of Medusa".
It has been the intention of this review to tackle a few of the contributions in depth rather than skim briefly over many. Those who are interested will I'm sure be prepared to persevere with the other essays for the book as a whole is full of fascinating and frequently poignant comments. The introductory essay by Liebman is very good and raises many interesting questions about the role of memory within history itself, a question which is outside of the scope of the review. For those interested in the cinema of the Holocaust and also those interested in documentary film making methods this book is a must.


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Update - Added today's news to the current post to keep the Cataclysm announcement on top, just to make sure that mods don't yell at users who won't understand what's going on.
Cataclysm content removed from the site
Blizzard asked us to remove all the content from the Cataclysm Alpha on the site. I don't have any reason or project to be an internet superhero because none of the underwear I have look nice over my pants and I'm in the process of removing all the content from the site.
Obviously, it also means that a few rules changed for you, my wonderful users:
- You cannot post anything from the Cataclysm Alpha on the forums. You can only discuss what was already posted on official sites/blue posts.
- Any screenshot from the Alpha will be removed and will earn you a 1 week ban. We will start enforcing this rule tomorrow to make sure you had time to read this post.
- I will track down anyone mentioning an emulated server/sandbox on my forums, find where he lives, and steal all his left shoes. You will also be banned permanently for that.
- No Blizzard-hate posts either, I support their decisions even when they aren't the nicest thing for me.
- Obviously, bans aren't retroactive and you won't get banned if you posted about something 3 days ago. It will just be deleted
Important - People who posted on the new Cataclysm forums should know about two things :
- Your posts aren't deleted, people who worked hard on compilations will just have their posts archived "somewhere" and we'll bring them back when the NDA is lifted.
- The new Cataclysm forums are also hidden for the moment. Stick to the old Cataclysm General Discussions forums and please be nice.
I apologize for the short notice, the content will be back as soon as the NDA is lifted.
Recent In-Game Fixes - May 2010 - 5/11
Ruby Sanctum 3.3.5 PTR Testing
World of Warcraft Official Magazine Issue #2
Blue posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment


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Aircraft that can alter their wing configurations in mid-flight have been in development since World War II. With different wing positions allowing for greater efficiency and performance in various flight modes, these aircraft are more versatile than aircraft with fixed wings. Although a few models have made it into production, the limitations of engines, mechanics and computers have kept these aircraft from coming into widespread use. Now technology has finally caught up with the concept, and Northrop Grumman is in the process of building an unmanned shape-shifting plane: the Switchblade.
If you look at aircraft from World War I or World War II, you'll notice that the wings are almost always perpendicular to the fuselage, with only a few degrees of backwards sweep, if any. At the time, airplane engines couldn't propel the planes any faster than about 375 mph. At these low speeds, a perpendicular wing configuration allowed for maximum lift and maneuverability.
After World War II, the development of jet engines led to an enormous boost in aircraft speed. Traditional wing shapes weren't as efficient at high speeds (particularly supersonic speeds), so jet fighters began sporting tapered wings. The F-4 Phantom II is a good example of this type of wing profile. However, this increase in high-speed performance came with a trade-off -- the planes were not very effective or efficient at lower speeds.
An aircraft that can alter its wing configuration in mid-flight has variable-wing geometry. This gives the plane the best possible performance characteristics at a given speed. The German Messerschmitt company first tested planes with variable wing geometry during World War II. The Messerschmitt P-1101's wings could be moved to different sweep angles, only while the plane was on the ground. Based on the Messerschmitt design, the U.S. developed a working test craft, the Bell X-5, which was slightly larger than the P-1101 and could change its wing-sweep angle while in flight.
This type of technology, also known as "swing wing," first appeared in a production aircraft in the late 1960s with the General Dynamics F-111. This plane had three different wing positions to give it maximum efficiency at all speeds. In fact, a variation of this plane, the FB-111A strategic bomber, carried the unofficial nickname "Switchblade." [ref].
Several other fighter jets used variable-geometry wings in the next few decades, including the Tornado and the F-14 Tomcat. The unswept wing position made these planes exceptionally maneuverable and easier to land on the short flight decks of aircraft carriers. However, the mechanisms required to make the wing movements function were complicated and heavy. They also took up a lot of space, cutting down on efficiency and payload. Swing wings were largely abandoned for more simplistic designs.
In the next section we'll look at the Switchblade plane design.


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Stylize your videos and presentations with these "paper jam folds" stopmotion web and computer cutout elements! All clips have alpha channel and audios embedded!
Full HD resolution. Import in your editing or compositing software and drag & drop over your videos! Very useful for After effects, Avid, Premiere pro, Vegas, Edius, Fusion, Final-cut and more editors!
Here is a brief catalog of what's inside this pack!:11 social media network icons, 4 address icons, mouse & hand pointers, search and web bars,like banners, computer smily & usb cable paper background! -Enjoy
::: More "paper cut" stop-motion elements :::
After effects Stop motion promo project :::
Check out more useful stuff:


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