Year: 2009

The Chicago Tribune has just published two important articles on how untested and potentially dangerous medical treatments are being used on autistic children by US parents desperate for a cure.

Many of these treatments are based on flimsy or non-existent evidence and they are being promoted by a subculture of parents of autistic children, who seem to overlap significantly with the anti-vaccination movement.

Dr. Carlos Pardo was trying to head off trouble.

The Johns Hopkins neurologist and his colleagues had autopsied the brains of people with autism who died in accidents and found evidence of neuroinflammation. This rare look inside the autistic brain had the potential to increase understanding of the mysterious disorder.

It also, he knew, could inspire doctors aiming to help children recover from autism to develop new experimental treatments — even though the research was so preliminary the scientists did not know whether the inflammation was good or bad, or even how it might relate to autism.

So when Pardo and his colleagues published their paper in the Annals of Neurology in 2005, they added an online primer that clearly explained their findings in layman’s terms and sternly warned doctors not to use them to develop treatments…

Citing Pardo’s research, doctors have treated children with a blood product typically reserved for people with severe immune system disorders like the one known as “bubble boy” disease. They have used it to justify sealing children with autism in pressurized bags and submarine-like metal chambers. Other children have been given a drug used to treat extremely rare genetic disorders.

The articles have several more examples of how scientific findings have been distorted or misinterpreted to justify dubious treatments (like chelation therapy, hormone suppressors and hyperbaric chambers) without any clear evidence for their benefit.

They’re both in-depth articles but are well worth your time as, along with Wired’s recent article on autism and antivaxxers, they are some of the best mainstream articles to track the growing trend for pseudo-medical autism treatments in recent times.

Link to ‘Risky alternative therapies have little basis in science’.
Link to ‘Science hijacked to support alternative therapies’ (both via MeFi)

Henry Markram, leader of the Blue Brain neural tissue simulation project, has sent an angry email to IBM following their widely-reported but misleading announcement that they’d created a simulation as complex as a cat brain.

This has come some months after similar headlines declared that an equivalent of a ‘mouse brain’ had been simulated by the IBM-affiliated Blue Brain project.

The initial claims were clearly false, as the project only aims to simulate cortical columns, a type of highly organised brain tissue that is common in the cortex, and the most recent simulation to make the headlines is even more simple.

Even the Blue Brain project, which is attempting realistic biological simulations, is not aiming to simulate the complexity or the function of a whole brain, in the same way that a simulation of muscle tissue, no matter how accurate, is clearly not going to produce an artificial human.

In an email which was copied to several leading science publications, project leader Henry Markram takes IBM’s PR department and one of their cognitive computing researchers to task for ‘stupid statements’ and ‘mass deception of the public’ – and those statements are some of the tamer ones. Here are points 1-3:

1. These are point neurons (missing 99.999% of the brain; no branches; no detailed ion channels; the simplest possible equation you can imagine to simulate a neuron, totally trivial synapses; and using the STDP learning rule I discovered in this way is also is a joke).

2. All these kinds of simulations are trivial and have been around for decades – simply called artificial neural network (ANN) simulations. We even stooped to doing these kinds of simulations as bench mark tests 4 years ago with 10’s of millions of such points before we bought the Blue Gene/L. If we (or anyone else) wanted to we could easily do this for a billion “points”, but we would certainly not call it a cat-scale simulation. It is really no big deal to simulate a billion points interacting if you have a big enough computer. The only step here is that they have at their disposal a big computer. For a grown up “researcher” to get excited because one can simulate billions of points interacting is ludicrous.

3. It is not even an innovation in simulation technology. You don’t need any special “C2 simulator”, this is just a hoax and a PR stunt. Most neural network simulators for parallel machines can can do this today. Nest, pNeuron, SPIKE, CSIM, etc, etc. all of them can do this! We could do the same simulation immediately, this very second by just loading up some network of points on such a machine, but it would just be a complete waste of time – and again, I would consider it shameful and unethical to call it a cat simulation.

It’s a stinging response from someone clearly annoyed at the misrepresentation of this sort of biological simulation work.

If you want to get a good handle on the aims of the Blue Brain project at least, Jonah Lehrer’s piece for Seed is the best you’re likely to read for a while.

Link to Markram’s email in IEEE Spectrum (via @Neurotechnology)

Colombia has an official Day of the Psychologist and you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a self-declared promotional event by the psychology association here, but it isn’t, the day is established by law. Article 92 of Law 1090 establishes 20th November as the official celebration.

Psychology departments around the country usually celebrate the day with conferences and parties. I was kindly invited to give a talk on the ‘Neuropsicología de Alucinaciones’ at the four day conference (wow) at the University of Antioquia, so many thanks to everyone who attended.

Later on, there is a free concert at the university which will be broadcast live on radio station La Mega, so you can see the celebration is taken quite seriously.

It turns out that Colombia is not the only country with a ‘day of the psychologist’ as they also seem to happen in Argentina (13th October), Guatemala (23rd July), Uruguay (6th December), Mexico (22nd May) and Cuba (13th April).

I’m wondering whether this is purely a Latin American phenomenon, so if you know of any more, anywhere in the world, please let me know.

So, qué tengas un buen Día Nacional del Psicólogo and I’ll see you at the concert.

The Wall Street Journal has a revealing article on why Argentina has the largest concentration of psychologists anywhere in the world and why it has a long-standing cultural fascination with psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is a set of psychological theories and form of psychotherapy based strongly on the ideas of Freud. Buenos Aires is one of the world centres of psychoanalysis and has been since the earliest days of Freud’s work.

Unlike in many countries, where psychoanalysis was, and remains, a psychology for the rich, the practice took off in Argentina during the 1960s to the point where is is common for everyday folk to see an analyst. The WSJ cites a recent survey suggesting that 32% of Argentinians have seen an analyst at some point in their lives.

Argentina is also known as a centre of Lacanian psychoanalysis, based on the work of French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan. If you can, imagine a French post-modern take on Freud. If you can’t, reading Lacan is unlikely to help because it’s an almost impenetrable reinterpretation of what was already a set of theories that was fairly loopy in places.

But psychoanalysis is more than a psychological practice in Argentina, it is a central part of the culture, and the WSJ article explores some of its social popularity.

Psychoanalysis is embedded in the geography of Buenos Aires, where many analysts are clustered in a neighborhood popularly known as Villa Freud.

Freudian thought colors political reporting. The newsweekly Noticias recently turned to a panel of 10 psychoanalysts to explain the behavior of ex-president Néstor Kirchner, who has been stealing the policymaking spotlight from his wife, Cristina, the current president.

One magazine query: What to make of Mrs. Kirchner’s statement that her husband sleeps in the fetal position?

Meanwhile, on TV, a drama series called “Tratame Bien,” (“Treat Me Well”), focuses on the travails of Jos√© and Sofia, a husband and wife, each of whom has an analyst. Facing midlife crises, the two make a momentous decision: retaining a third analyst they can see together for couples’ therapy.

Interestingly, lots of Latin America is still heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, probably due to the historical influences of the USA to the North and Argentina in the West.

However, since working here, I’ve realised that doing evidence-based empirical psychology and psychiatry is a lot more difficult in countries with limited resources.

Access to the evidence is expensive (thanks to the use of restrictive copyright and excessive pricing by scientific journals) and research is difficult when there is little free time and few funding opportunities.

However, this is much less of an issue with psychoanalysis because the major source of information is your own experience, insights and work with the patient, plus discussions in a limited set of journals.

In other words, it’s much easier to fulfil the requirements of what is expected of a well-informed competent psychoanalytic practitioner than what is expected of a scientifically-oriented evidence-based psychologist.

This, I suspect, is one of the many reasons that psychoanalysis remains popular in Latin America.

Link to WSJ piece on psychoanalysis in Argentina (via PCFTI).
Link to entry for Argentina in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell recently published a collection of his essays in his new book What the Dog Saw. It was recently reviewed in The New York Times by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker who complements Gladwell as “a writer of many gifts” but notes that “he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong”.

Pinker cites several errors (including describing eigenvalues as ‘Igon values’) but cites one claim, over the link between IQ and American football players’ rankings, as “simply not true”.

Gladwell has just written a stinging response where he notes Pinker was using data from blog posts rather than the scientific article Gladwell was basing his claims on.

While the two writers spar over the details, the subtext is that Pinker is a proponent of IQ being a reliable predictor of success with a significant genetic influence (see The Blank Slate) whereas Gladwell has argued that success is largely a combination of practice plus being in the right place at the right time (see Outliers).

However, you may be interested to know that all of the essays collected in Gladwell’s new book are available for free on his website, so you can try before you buy.

Link to Pinker’s review in the NYT
Link to Gladwell’s reply (via @carlzimmer).