Bird Brains.

• Author: TORREY, E. FULLER
• Position: Questionable research priorities at National Institute of Mental Health - Statistical Data Included

While 2.3 million Americans suffer from bipolar disorder, the National Institute of Mental Health is studying how pigeons think

BIRDS ARE EVERYWHERE AT THE National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). There are sparrows, finches, canaries, bluebirds, parrots, doves, and even rare bowerbirds--all the subjects of research studies. And, of course, there are pigeons. The Institute has 14 research grants on pigeons alone. There are so many birds at NIMH that St. Francis is rumored to be on the short list for NIMH's next appointed director.

NIMH is supposed to be the federal government's pre-eminent medical research institution, investigating the cause and better treatment of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which are expensive, debilitating diseases. But the birds are partial evidence the Institute has run afoul of its basic mission.

The 14 research awards to study pigeons, which together total over $1.2 million per year, were all given to psychologists who propose to learn how pigeons think. In one of them, for example, pigeons are shown a series of pictures to see whether they can recognize the same object differently represented. According to NIMH, this will tell us "how pigeons extract categorical information from photographs of real objects and learn abstract relations." The next time you toss the remnants of your sandwich to our feathered friends in your local park, you will no longer have to wonder what the pigeons are thinking. Just call NIMH and someone will tell you.

Altogether NIMH is currently supporting 33 research grants to study birds. These can be seen on the Internet by going to www.nih.gov, clicking on the CRISP database under "Grants and Funding Opportunities, then typing in "pigeon" or "songbird" under search terms. If, on the other hand, you wish to know how many research grants NIMH is supporting to study bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), type in "bipolar." The query will yield a total of 128 hits, but many of these have little or nothing to do with bipolar disorder. Only 14 of them--the same number of research grants given for studying pigeons--are related to testing medications for improving the treatment of this illness. By NIMH's own figures, bipolar disorder affects "more than 2.3 million Americans ages 18 and over" or "about 1 percent of the population," and many of these are in need of better medications for treatment.

Given this meager allocation for research resources for the treatment of bipolar disorder, how does NIMH justify its avian inclinations? Studies of pigeons are said to help us understand cognitive processes and learning. For example, according to NIMH, the research grant described above, in which pigeons are shown a series of pictures, "will increase our understanding of higher-order human cognition, contribute to the detection and development of treatments of cognitive disorders, and facilitate ecologically valid educational practices."

A newcomer to Washington might naively think that facilitating "ecologically valid educational practices" is the responsibility of the Department of Education. But that is not how Washington works. Success in Washington comes from constantly enlarging one's institutional boundaries, and nobody has done this more successfully than NIMH.

Among NIMH's recent research awards are projects that should have been assigned to the Department of Education ("Understanding Reading Problems in At-Risk Children"), the Department of State ("Coping with Change in Czechoslovakia"), the Department of Justice ("Models of Face Recognition"), and the National Transportation Safety Board ("Software System for Prediction of Shiftwork Alertness"). Even within the National Institutes of Health, NIMH assumes responsibility for research projects that clearly belong to other institutes. Recently funded examples include "Ruminative Style Effects on Delay in Breast Cancer," "Mental Health and Lung Transplantation," "Self Regulation and Susceptibility to Colds and Flu," and "At-Risk Irritable Infants."

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