A project I’ve been working on a for a long time has just launched:
By talking to the @ChoiceEngine twitter-bot you can navigate an essay about choice, complexity and the nature of our minds. Along the way I argue why the most famous experiment on the neuroscience of free will doesn’t really tell us much, and discuss the wasp which made Darwin lose his faith in a benevolent god. And there’s this animated gif:
Follow and tweet START @ChoiceEngine to begin
Psychologists have been measuring reaction times since before psychology existed, and they are still a staple of cognitive psychology experiments today. Typically psychologists look for a difference in the time it takes participants to respond to stimuli under different conditions as evidence of differences in how cognitive processing occurs in those conditions.
Galton, the famous eugenicist and statistician, collected a large data set (n=3410) of so called ‘simple reaction times’ in the last years of the 19th century. Galton’s interest was rather different from most modern psychologists – he was interested in measures of reaction time as a indicator of individual differences. Galton’s theory was that differences in processing speed might underlie differences in intelligence, and maybe those differences could be efficiently assessed by recording people’s reaction times.
Galton’s data creates an interesting opportunity – are people today, over 100 years later, faster or slower than Galton’s participants? If you believe Galton’s theory, the answer wouldn’t just tell you if you would be likely to win in a quick-draw contest with a Victorian gunslinger, it could also provide an insight into generational changes in cognitive function more broadly.
Reaction time [RT] data provides an interesting counterpoint to the most famous historical change in cognitive function – the generation on generation increase in IQ scores, known as the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect surprises two kinds of people – those who look at “kids today” and know by instinct that they are less polite, less intelligent and less disciplined their own generation (this has been documented in every generation back to at least Ancient Greece), and those who look at kids today and know by prior theoretical commitments that each generation should be dumber than the previous (because more intelligent people have fewer children, is the idea).
Whilst the Flynn Effect contradicts the idea that people are getting dumber, some hope does seem to lie in the reaction time data. Maybe Victorian participants really did have faster reaction times! Several research papers (1, 2) have tried to compare Galton’s results to more modern studies, some of which tried to use the the same apparatus as well as the same method of measurement. Here’s Silverman (2010):
the RTs obtained by young adults in 14 studies published from 1941 on were compared with the RTs obtained by young adults in a study conducted by Galton in the late 1800s. With one exception, the newer studies obtained RTs longer than those obtained by Galton. The possibility that these differences in results are due to faulty timing instruments is considered but deemed unlikely.
So the difference is only ~20 milliseconds (i.e. one fiftieth of a second) over 100 years, but in reaction time terms that’s a hefty chunk – it means modern participants are about 10% slower!
What are we to make of this? Normally we wouldn’t put much weight on a single study, even one with 3000 participants, but there aren’t many alternatives. It isn’t as if we can have access to young adults born in the 19th century to check if the result replicates. It’s a shame there aren’t more intervening studies, so we could test the reasonable prediction that participants in the 1930s should be about halfway between the Victorian and modern participants.
And, even if we believe this datum, what does it mean? A genuine decline in cognitive capacity? Excess cognitive load on other functions? Motivational changes? Changes in how experiments are run or approached by participants? I’m not giving up on the kids just yet.
References:
The Kardashian index is a semi-humorous metric invented to the reveal how much trust you should put in a scientist with a public image.
In ‘The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists‘, the author writes:
I am concerned that phenomena similar to that of Kim Kardashian may also exist in the scientific community. I think it is possible that there are individuals who are famous for being famous
and
a high K-index is a warning to the community that researcher X may have built their public profile on shaky foundations, while a very low K-index suggests that a scientist is being undervalued. Here, I propose that those people whose K-index is greater than 5 can be considered ‘Science Kardashians’
Your Kardashian index is calculated from your number of twitter followers and the number of citations your scholarly papers have. You can use the ‘Kardashian Index Calculator‘ to find out your own Kardashian Index, if you have a twitter account and a Google Scholar profile.
The implication of the Kardashian index is that the Foundation of someone’s contribution to public debate about science is their academic publishing. But public debate and scholarly debate are rightfully different things, even if related. To think that only scientists should be listened to in public debate is to think that other forms of skill and expertise aren’t relevant, including the skill of translating between different domains of expertise.
Communicating scientific topics, explaining and interpreting new findings and understanding the relevance of science to people’s lives and of people’s lives to science are skills in itself. The Kardashian Index ignores that, and so undervalues it.
Full disclosure: My Kardashian Index is 25.
An important interview with the neuroscience laboratory manager from the Human Brain Project revealing some previously unknown details about the running of this important scientific endeavour.
via @jpeelle
“Boys risk becoming addicted to porn, video games and Ritalin” says psychologist Philip Zimbardo, which simply isn’t true, because some weekends I read.
Yes, Zimbardo has a theory which says that masculinity is being damaged by computer games, the internet, and pornography without an adequate plot line. A key solution: dancing. He’s done a cracking interview in The Guardian which I thoroughly recommend if you are still waiting for your Ritalin to kick in.
“Boys have never been self-reflective. Boys are focused on doing and acting, girls are more focused on being and feeling. The new video-game world encourages doing and acting and not really thinking. Video games are not so attractive to girls.”
Not really thinking? There’s a man who’s never played Bubble Bobble. And finally some sense in the video game debate. Hang up your coat Anita Sarkeesian.
And pornography? “The relative proportions are hard to come by. But for girls, it’s just boring. In general, sex has always been linked with romance for girls – much more than for boys. For boys it’s always been much more visual and physical…”
“With the old pornography there were typically stories. There was a movie, like Deep Throat, and in the course of some interesting theme people were having sex. Now it’s only about physical sexual contact.”
Oh my God! The washing machine has broken in the cheerleaders’ apartment. Now they’ll never get to the game. [Ding Dong] Wait, who could this be?
“It’s always been difficult for boys to talk to girls because you are never sure what they want or what their agenda is. And now without trying or practice it becomes more and more difficult. So it’s a reason to retreat into this virtual world.”
Phil, I know their agenda. They want quality plumbing without having to pay in cash.
“In online porn, the men are incredibly well-endowed – they are paid precisely because they have those attributes. In addition, some of the men take penile injections so they can perform for half an hour non-stop. When you’re a 10 or 15-year-old kid, you say to yourself, ‘I will never, ever look like that or perform like that’.”
I never thought that when I was 15. It’s been adult life that has made the 30 minute mark seem like an impossible dream.
Indeed, he argues that schools are increasingly ill-suited to boys’ needs – another reason for their retreat into cyberspace. In the US, he says, 90% of elementary school teachers are women, while in the UK one in five teachers is a man. “Female teachers can be wonderful but they model skills that girls are good at – fine motor tuning rather than big physical activity. They don’t like boys running around. And, with funding shortages, they’re eliminating gym classes so boys don’t have the time to do physical activity.” He cites schoolchildren being assigned to write diaries as a compositional task. “Boys don’t write diaries! The worst thing I can imagine giving a boy as a present is a diary.”
Fair point, just look at what happened to Adrian Mole.
What can be done to reconnect boys with the real world? Zimbardo has lots of suggestions: more male teachers, more incentives for men to establish boys’ and men’s groups so that the former can get the masculine mentoring they otherwise lack, welfare reform to encourage fathers to remain in the family loop, crowdsourcing initiatives to fund video games that are less violent and require more co-operation, parents to talk to their sons about sex and relationships so they don’t take porn to represent real life.
All genuinely helpful suggestions and then..
My favourite suggestion is that boys learn to dance. “It’s the easiest thing in the world,”
We’re British Phil. WE ARE BRITISH MALES. We look like two legged donkeys drunk on alcopops when we dance. And that’s *after* the dance lessons.
If you actually want to see someone take on Zimbardo’s claims with evidence, I could do no better than Andrew Przybylski from the The Oxford Internet Institute debating him on the BBC.
And amazingly, the full Guardian interview is full of even more clangers. Can’t wait for the book.
Link to Guardian interview with Philip Zimbardo.
Marketing magazine has an interview with the marketing director of KFC who explains why he thinks neuroscience holds the key to selling deep-fried junk food.
“Marketing as a whole is undergoing transformation,” he says. “We now know through neuroscience how people’s brains work and what affects their decision-making. So what we’re trying to do is take the new knowledge and say – this is how we put it together, this is how a brain actually works – and this is how we should be marketing.”
Somebody, please, find me a pizza.
Link to Marketing interview.
This is a video of Professor Stephen Stahl, author of Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology, doing a DSM-5 themed version of Stayin’ Alive by the BeeGees.
After working out that, no, no-one has dropped acid in your morning Red Bull, you may notice that the professor busts some pretty respectable moves.
Link to video on YouTube (via @AllenFrancesMD)
Artists brains are ‘structurally different’ according to The Independent, who report on a small, thought-provoking but as yet quite preliminary study.
The image used to illustrate the article (the one on the right) is described as showing “more grey and white matter in artists’ brains connected to visual imagination and fine motor control”.
This could be a bit alarming, especially if you are an artist, because that’s actually a map of a mouse brain.
Whether artists have ‘different brains’ or not, in any meaningful sense, is perhaps slightly beside the point, but you can be rest assured that they’re not so different that they will give you a sudden desire to scamper around looking for cheese.
An editorial in Molecular Psychiatry has been titled “Launching the War on Mental Illness” – which, considering the effects of war on mental health, must surely win a prize for the most inappropriate metaphor in psychiatry.
But it also contains a curious Freudian slip. Five times in the article, the project is described as the ‘War on Mental Health’, which is another thing entirely.
…how can we then proceed to successfully launch a ‘War on Mental Health’? Our vision for that is summarized in Figure 3 and Table 1.
Sadly, Figure 3 and Table 1 don’t contain a description of a world with continuous traffic jams, rude waiters and teenagers constantly playing R&B through their mobile phone speakers.
Link to Launching the ‘War on Mental Illness’ (thanks @1boringyoungman)
As a wonderful demonstration how media outlets will report the ridiculous as long as ‘neuroscience’ is mentioned, I present the ‘Oreos May Be As Addictive As Cocaine’ nonsense.
According to Google News, it has so far been reported by 209 media outlets, including some of the world’s biggest publications.
That’s not bad for some non-peer reviewed, non-published research described entirely in a single press release from a Connecticut college and done in rats.
The experiment, described in five lines of the press release, is this:
On one side of a maze, they would give hungry rats Oreos and on the other, they would give them a control – in this case, rice cakes. (“Just like humans, rats don’t seem to get much pleasure out of eating them,” Schroeder said.) Then, they would give the rats the option of spending time on either side of the maze and measure how long they would spend on the side where they were typically fed Oreos…
They compared the results of the Oreo and rice cake test with results from rats that were given an injection of cocaine or morphine, known addictive substances, on one side of the maze and a shot of saline on the other. Professor Schroeder is licensed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to purchase and use controlled substances for research.
The research showed the rats conditioned with Oreos spent as much time on the “drug” side of the maze as the rats conditioned with cocaine or morphine.
Needless to say, South American drug lords are probably not shutting up shop just yet.
But this is how you make headlines around the world and get your press release reported as a ‘health story’ in the international media.
As we’ve noted before, the ‘as addictive as cocaine’ cliché gets wheeled out on a regular basis even for the most unlikely of activities but this really takes the biscuit (“Bad jokes addictive as cocaine” say British scientist’s readers).
However, the alternative conclusion that ‘Cocaine is no more addictive than Oreos’ seems not to have been as popular. Only Reason magazine opted for this one.
The reason that this sort of press release makes headlines is simply because it agrees with the already established tropes that obesity is a form of ‘addiction’ and is ‘explained’ by some vague mention of the brain and dopamine.
The more easily we agree with something, the less critical thinking we apply.
Link to a more sensible take from Reason magazine.
As shots rang out across the courtyard, I ducked behind my desk, my adrenaline pumping. Enraged by the inexplicable violence of this complex and multi-faceted attack, I promised the public I would use this opportunity to push my own pet theory of mass shootings.
Only a few days have passed since this terrible tragedy and I want to start by paying lip service to the need for respectful remembrance and careful evidence-gathering before launching into my half-cocked ideas.
The cause was simple. It was whatever my prejudices suggested would cause a mass shooting and this is being widely ignored by the people who have the power to implement my prejudices as public policy.
I want to give you some examples of how ignoring my prejudices directly led to the mass shooting.
The gunman grew up in an American town and had a series of experiences, some common to millions of American people, some unique to him. But it wasn’t until he started to involve himself in the one thing that I particularly object to, that he started on the path to mass murder.
The signs were clear to everyone but they were ignored because other people haven’t listened to the same point-of-view I expressed on the previous occasion the opportunity arose.
Research on the risk factors for mass shootings has suggested that there are a number of characteristics that have an uncertain statistical link to these tragic events but none that allow us to definitively predict a future mass shooting.
But I want to use the benefit of hindsight to underline one factor I most agree with and describe it as if it can be clearly used to prevent future incidents.
I am going to try and convince you of this in two ways. I am going to selectively discuss research which supports my position and I’m going to quote an expert to demonstrate that someone with a respected public position agrees with me.
Several scientific papers in a complex and unsettled debate about this topic could be taken to support my position. A government report also has a particular statistic which I like to quote.
Highlighting these findings may make it seem like my position is the most probable explanation despite no clear overall conclusion but a single quote from one of the experts will seal the issue in my favour.
“Mass shootings” writes forensic psychiatrist Anand Pandya, an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, “have repeatedly led to political discourse”. But I take from his work that my own ideas, to quote Professor Pandya, “may be useful after future gun violence”.
Be warned. People who don’t share my biases are pushing their own evidence-free theories in the media, but without hesitation, I can definitely say they are wrong and, moreover, biased.
It is clear that the main cause of this shooting was the thing I disliked before the mass shooting happened. I want to disingenuously imply that if my ideas were more widely accepted, this tragedy could have been averted.
Do we want more young people to die because other people don’t agree with me?
UPDATE: Due to the huge negative reaction this article has received, I would like to make some minor concession to my critics while accusing them of dishonesty and implying that they are to blame for innocent deaths. Clearly, we should be united by in the face of such terrible events and I am going to appeal to your emotions to emphasise that not standing behind my ideas suggests that you are against us as a country and a community.
Funny or Die is supposedly a comedy site but they seem to have a brief video tutorial on how to undertake neurally informed domestic negotiations.
The credits of the video give special thanks to Dr Dan Siegel – founder of ‘the exciting field of interpersonal neurobiology’.
I think that might be a joke though as the video seemed relatively free of flowery neurojargon.
The Headlines
The Telegraph: Surge in ‘digital dementia’
The Daily Mail: ‘Digital dementia’ on the rise as young people increasingly rely on technology instead of their brain
Fox News: Is ‘digital dementia’ plaguing teenagers?
The Story
South Korea has the highest proportion of people with smartphones, 67%. Nearly 1 in 5 use their phone for more than 7 hours in a day, it is reported. Now a doctor in Seoul reports that teenagers are reporting with symptoms more normally found in those with head injury or psychiatric illness. He claims excessive smartphone use is leading to asymmetrical brain development, emotional stunting and could “in as many as 15 per cent of cases lead to the early onset of dementia”.
What they actually did
Details from the news stories are sketchy. Dr Byun Gi-won, in Seoul, provided the quotes, but it doesn’t seem as if he has published any systematic research. Perhaps the comments are based on personal observation?
The Daily Mail quotes an article which reported that 14% of young people felt that their memory was poor. The Mail also contains the choice quote that “[Doctors] say that teenagers have become so reliant on digital technology they are no longer able to remember everyday details such as their phone numbers.”
How plausible is this?
It is extremely plausible that people should worry about their memories, or that doctors should find teenagers uncooperative, forgetful and inattentive. The key question is whether our memories, or teenagers’ cognitive skills, are worse than they ever have been – and if smart phones are to blame for this. The context for this story is a recurring moral panic about young people, new forms of technology and social organisation.
For a long time it was TV, before that it was compulsory schooling (“taking kids out of their natural environment”). When the newspaper became common people complained about the death of conversation. Plato even complained that writing augured the death of memory and understanding). The story also draws on the old left brain-right brain myth, which – despite being demonstrably wrong – will probably never die.
Tom’s take
Of course, it is possible that smartphones (or the internet, or TV, or newspapers, or writing) could damage our thinking abilities. But all the evidence suggest the opposite, with year by year and generation-by-generation rises found in IQ scores. One of the few revealing pieces of research in this area showed that people really are more forgetful of information they know can be easily retrieved, but actually better able to remember where to find that information again.
This isn’t dementia, but a completely normally process of relying on our environment to store information for us. You can see the moral panic driving these stories reflected in the use of that quote about teenagers not being able to remember phone numbers. So what! I can’t remember phone numbers any more – because I don’t need to. The only evidence for dementia in these stories is the lack of critical thought from the journalists reporting them.
Read more
Vaughan Bell on a media history of information scares.
Christian Jarret on Why the Left-Brain Right-Brain Myth Will Probably Never Die
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
A revolutionary new medication for Hyper Involuntary Panic Stress Tension Elevation Response (HIPSTER Disorder) has become available.
Now available from all good lo-fi dubstep jazz lounges (via BoingBoing)
We’ve covered some dodgy neuroscience journalism in our time but The Daily Mail has such as amazing piece of tosh, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be serious or the result of huffing bathroom cleaner.
Now I try and avoid writing about The Daily Mail because it’s so science impaired it’s a bit like complaining that your pantomime horse won’t gallop properly.
But this is just amazing.
Where evil lurks: Neurologist discovers ‘dark patch’ inside the brains of killers and rapists
Hmmm, this sounds like it’s going to be a sensational piece of nonsense. I wonder what the ‘dark patch’ refers to?
A German neurologist claims to have found the area of the brain where evil lurks in killers, rapists and robbers.
It’s not looking good. Evil doesn’t ‘lurk’ in any part of the brain.
Bremen scientist Dr Gerhard Roth says the ‘evil patch’ lies in the brain’s central lobe and shows up as a dark mass on X-rays.
Evil patch? X-rays? Dark mass? But sweet Jesus in heaven. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE CENTRAL LOBE?
Screw the ‘dark patch’ these evil-doers have grown another lobe. The man has discovered mutant three-lobe killer rapists.
Believe it or not, it actually gets worse.
I could explain where the article has gone wrong but I’m too busy pushing furniture up against the windows. You won’t take me alive creatures of darkness!
Link to it’s not satire if written while high on cleaning products.
At last, the scourge of catnip has got the attention it deserves with this hard-hitting film. It reveals the mind-bending effects and devestating impact of this feline street high.
Do you know where your kitties are?
Mind Hacks 