Category: News

Wired’s Danger Room blog took a trip on Commando Solo, the US Air Force plane that’s been specially modified for the Psychological Operations or PsyOps division to create instant radio and television stations to broadcast persuasive messages to the people below.

As you might expect, the article doesn’t reveal a huge amount and there’s lots of close angle photos that look like the sort of thing a military aviation perv might take on the subway.

However, it does reveal a little about what it’s like to work in the mobile studio and it does mention the difficulty with measuring impact of their work – a constant point of contention with PsyOps work.

Measuring the effectiveness of a bomber or a strike fighter is fairly straightforward: The art of bomb damage assessment, measuring the size of a bomb crater or effective blast radius of airdropped weapons. What about when your weapon is a television or radio signal, and your goal is the somewhat more nebulous aim of “influencing” a target?

“The biggest challenge is measuring our effectiveness,” said Rice. “We don’t have a way to look at it — we don’t have BDA.

Link to Danger Room ‘Inside the Air Force‚Äôs Secret PsyOps Plane’.

An anonymous ex-member of the Human Terrain System, the team of social scientists deployed with the US Military, is now writing on the Wired Danger Room blog about role of the service in the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first article notes how in several recent operations the HTS has been notable by its absence.

As we’ve discussed before, the HTS project has been a source of some considerable controversy with fellow social scientists denouncing the project as ‘weaponised anthropology’ that violates the ‘do no harm’ principle.

The military intend the service to help understand the local population and complex alliances that define the social landscape in which they’re fighting but the Wired piece suggests that the Human Terrain System is being sidelined, either due to ignorance of its purpose or dislike of its approach amid the ranks.

How do you properly vet the insurgents you’re trying to “win over” to your side? Is simply promising not to attack your forces enough, or should you press for a formal integration with the government? At what point do a militant’s activities make him irredeemable?

Those are just some of the difficult choices facing U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan – questions explored in a fine, fine dispatch by the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe. In it, he tells the tale of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Brown, who led a group of soldiers during last year’s insurgent assault on Camp Keating, in Kamdesh district of Nuristan province. After the attack, Lt. Col. Brown faced a difficult choice: whether or not to align himself with a local warlord and militant, Mullah Sadiq, who promised to repel future Taliban attacks.

It seems like the sorts of question were designed to be answered by the Human Terrain System. HTS is the famously controversial U.S. Army program to embed various types of social scientists with Brigade Combat Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ostensibly, these Human Terrain Teams should be out, canvassing the local population to gauge their interests, feelings, and preferences. The local HTT is conspicuously absent from Jaffe‚Äôs account of the events following the Kamdesh attack…

In theory, the HTTs would able to offer advice and informed analysis to the various commanders making decisions about how to relate to these communities. Often, the commanders don’t even know enough to ask, and in at least a few cases, the HTTs don’t know how to “pitch” their services. As events in Nuristan indicate, even if there is an HTT in the area, their advice could fall on deaf ears. Worse still: if they are deliberately or even unintentionally excluded from the very process they were deployed to influence—then HTS as a whole is facing a much more serious problem: just what, exactly, are they expected to do?

The Danger Room series from the pseudonymous writer of piece, named ‘Security Crank’, should be an interesting insight into the project although the byline mentions that he or she is currently working in the ‘national security establishment’ so we can probably expect that criticism will only go so far.

Link to Wired Danger Room on HTA in Afghanistan.

The latest Neuropod podcast tackles deep brain stimulation, blast injuries in soldiers, fibre-tracking brain scans and a group of hungover neurologists on an early morning run, in coverage from the recent American Academy of Neurology conference. In fact, it’s one of the best Nature Neuroscience podcasts I’ve heard in ages.

There’s also a fascinating bit about the history of phrenology by neurologist Daniel Schneider. Phrenology was the curious 19th practice of ‘reading bumps’ on the head to divine someone’s character based on the flawed idea that differences in brain structure would affect skull growth.

Schneider has searched medical and non-medical publications of the time and found, contrary to the belief that the practice was simply a fashion among the public, that the medical profession was more approving of the idea than the general populace.

As the practice was started by medical men it seemed respectable and gave a tool to help explain some scientific questions of the time, even if it didn’t live up to its promises.

As an aside, I note from the scientific programme of the meeting that neuropsychologist Brenda Milner was presenting some of her latest work on the recently departed amnesic patient HM.

It was pointed out to me that Milner is 92. Respect to that.

Link to Neuropod homepage.
mp3 of this podcast.

Wired Science interviews a professional observer in the most important legal hearing for the use fMRI brain scan ‘lie detection’ technology yet to come to court.

The observer was Owen Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, and the hearing was over the scientific status of ‘lie detection’ scans done by commercial company Cephos and are been touted by the defence in a case of someone accused of defrauding medical insurance in the US.

The debate is over whether the technology reaches the Daubert standard, criteria for whether scientific testimony or a specific technology is considered reliable enough to be admissible as evidence.

The case is interesting in light of the discussion we covered about the variety of possible legal uses of fMRI, as the lawyers wanting the evidence admitted are not wanting to use it as a straight-forward truth test about something that did or did not happen in the external world.

But rather, whether the accused is telling the truth about their earlier intentions. In other words, it’s a question of their honesty about an earlier mental state.

Wired.com: Is there anything special about the way the defense is trying to use fMRI in this case?

Jones: One of the things about this case that has gone undernoticed is that even though fMRI lie detection has not yet been admitted, the purposes for which people are seeking to admit it are already rapidly evolving. In this case, the defense is not attempting to introduce fMRI lie detection for purposes of verifying what was at some past time an external state of the world as, for example, when a hypothetical defendant says he was in his house at the time of the alleged murder. That would be a natural context to use lie detection. You’d ask, “Were you home? Are you lying?”

In this case, the defense is taking it to the meta-level. They are using a scan as evidence of a person’s prior state of mind. What’s at issue is whether the defendant knowingly and willfully did what he did. The defense is therefore attempting to offer fMRI to demonstrate his past state of mind. The report actually says, “Doctor Semrau’s brain indicates he is telling the truth in regards to not cheating or defrauding the government.” It means that we’re introducing evidence of the brain’s current assessment of the brain’s former mental state. That’s one of the things that makes it tricky. He’s trying to have his brain testify as to the prior state of his brain.

For fMRI to have already reached that level of complexity in the first case in which there has been a Daubert hearing gives some indication of how much more future litigation there is likely to be in this arena.

Although it seems a great deal of scientific evidence was presented by both sides, as far as I can make out, the type of ‘lie detection’ scanning done in this case deviates so far from the standard (and still not very reliable) lab procedure that the main thrust of the argument to have the scans admitted seems to be ‘oh, go on!’

Link to Wired Science on ‘Watershed’ Legal Hearing (via @edyong209)

I’m in the beautifully green city of Pereira as I’ve been kindly asked to speak at the National Psychiatry Residents Conference here in Colombia.

I shall try and at least make sure Spike activity appears but otherwise the next few days might be a bit quiet, not least as I admire the spectacular surroundings and enjoy the conference.

A video streaming site called Documentary Heaven has, among other things, a stack load of high quality psychology documentaries for your viewing pleasure.

There drawn from TV so they’re a bit of a mixed bunch from the lamentable BBC series ‘The Human Mind’, to the excellent biography of mathematician and subject of ‘A Beautiful Mind’ John Nash and the simply sublime programme ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ on Friedrich Nietzsche.

The definition of psychology is a little bit wide, but there’s plenty of good material to check out. In addition, I’d recommend the remarkable ‘Dr Money and the Boy with No Penis’, the level-headed documentary ‘Psychopath’, an informative BBC programme entitled ‘How Does Your Memory Work?’ and a good piece on synaesthesia called ‘Derek Tastes of Earwax’.

Not all of the links work and some are clearly drivel (‘The Secret’? Mercy no) but there are some gems there and hopefully a few starters above. Don’t miss the ‘Older Entries’ link at the bottom of the page for more.

Link to Documentary Heaven psychology collection.

Wired Science has covered a legal case where fMRI brain scan ‘lie detection’ data was offered as evidence. While the lawyer was initially hopeful, it was ruled inadmissible by the judge on the basis that judgements of witness credibility by the jury should be based on their impression of the witness.

It not clear from the reports exactly why fMRI evidence should not, in principal, contribute to the jury’s judgement of witness credibility along with other evidence, but arguments usually centre on the reliability of the technology based on an evaluation known as the Frye or Daubert test which assesses whether the technology is ‘generally accepted’ by the scientific community.

The tests are essentially the same and the basis of both is the 1923 Frye vs United States court case which involved, interestingly enough, an unsuccessful attempt to admit evidence from an early lie detector that used a measure of blood pressure.

Even more interestingly, the inventor of the ‘lie detector’ in this case was psychologist William Moulton Marston who is more famous as being the creator of Wonder Woman. It is no coincidence that the female super hero has a Lasso of Truth that wraps around the body and compels the person not to lie.

Marston’s device was the forerunner of the polygraph test which is only admissible in some state courts in the USA and generally falls foul of the Frye and Daubert ‘general acceptance’ criteria.

fMRI lie detection also fails to make this grade. Although studies have found that in some instances the technique can detect lies better than chance, the experiments have produced variable results, using situations that aren’t necessarily good matches to everyday situations (such as asking participants to lie about a playing card they saw) and have led some neuroscientsts to call for a suspension of its use.

However, the issue is not as clear cut as it seems and Frederick Schauer from the University of Virginia School of Law makes a convincing case in an upcoming article for the Cornell Law Review that scientific standards of evidence should not be applied wholesale to courts of law.

Most of the arguments from neuroscientists focus on the scenario where someone ‘might be sent to prison’ on the basis of fMRI evidence, but Schauer notes that this is only a tiny proportion of court cases and that evidence should be evaluated depending on the context.

Schauer argues that if the decision was genuinely about sending someone to prison the highest standards of reliability must apply, but lawyers regularly introduce less reliable evidence as part of a bigger picture.

For example, when a lawyer says ‘would an upstanding community man like this really be likely to kill his business partner?’ everyone accepts that this is not a highly reliable guide to whether someone is a murderer but as part of a collection of evidence it might help show that the prosecution cannot prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the accused is guilty. Numerous other types of similarly weak circumstantial evidence might also be presented.

This, Schauer says, could be where technology like fMRI lie detection could play a part. If it is 60% reliable and is simply a small part of a larger picture it seems daft to not allow it when similarly ‘unreliable’ evidence is admitted all the time. As he notes “Although slight evidence ought not to be good enough for scientists, it is a large part of the law.”

Furthermore, in civil cases the burden of proof is different and cases may be decided ‘on the balance of probabilities’ rather than the more stringent ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Additionally, lawyers may want to submit fMRI evidence not as evidence for deciding the case but as evidence for awarding damages.

In these cases, Schauer argues that applying the standards of science to legal cases without judging the context would be as bad as applying legal standards to science – like trying to decide a scientific question by inviting two people with opposing views and deciding who seems more credible.

The commercial fMRI lie-detector companies are currently trying as hard as they can to get the first evidence from their not very effective technology accepted in a court case. Eventually, it will probably happen but likely on some minor point in the bigger picture.

When it happens it will be widely hyped and the danger will be not that such evidence is allowed, but that it will be over-interpreted and misunderstood, in the same way that other scientific evidence is widely misinterpreted.

Indeed, if we needed warning about the dangers of this, it was illustrated by a recent case in India where unproven EEG ‘lie detection’ technology was accepted as key evidence in the conviction of a woman for murder.

Link to Wired Science to attempt to admit fMRI lie detection.
Link to Wired science on the evidence being rejected.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

You could not ask for a better combination. Coverage of the mirror movement mutation in a piece from Not Exactly Rocket Science and an article on Neurophilosophy.

The Independent covers the frankly mind-bending news that David Cronenberg is to make a film on the relationship between Freud and Jung with Keira Knightley playing Jung’s lover. I would have gone for Bruckheimer for director myself.

Fantastic research on whether it is best to knap at your desk or in bed covered by the BPS Research Digest. Why can’t we have more research like this? An evidence-based approach on the best day to chuck a sickie is sorely needed.

The Psychologist has an excellent article on the ‘impostor syndrome‘ with some fantastic detective work which sheds some new light on the idea.

That’s it. The Matrix is here. Mind boggling video from BoingBoing. Red pills at the ready.

New Jersey Magazine reporter Mara Altman volunteers for a study on female orgasm in the brain scanner.

There’s coverage of an odd decision by the Minnesota Supreme Court that bong water should considered an illegal substance over at the excellent Addiction Inbox.

New Scientist has an interview with Anil Seth, director of the new Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.

There’s an awesome and in-depth post on how three studies now refute the presence of the XMRV virus in patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) at Laika’s MedLibLog. See a previous Mind Hacks post for background on this controversial issue.

NPR has a fantastic brief segment on the discovery of laughing gas and why its pain killing properties were dismissed as unhelpful.

Should results from studies on suicide be kept out of the media to avoid prompting suicides? asks science writer Mun Keat Looi.

PBS has what looks like an awesome documentary on behavioural economics that’s only available online to people in the States. If it was to *cough* appear *cough* as a torrent though it would just be swell.

Dating by blood type in Japan is covered by BBC News. My blood was tested for the first time in my life the other week. It got an A+. I was very proud.

Neuroanthropology has an excellent essay about the attraction of negative news stories and the psychology of media fear-mongering.

What Happened When I Went Undercover at a Christian Gay-to-Straight Conversion Camp. A piece on AlterNet.

The Smithsonian Magazine have an archive of all their psychology and brain articles.

Darryl Cunningham’s awesome Psychiatric Tales graphic novel is out, details on his blog.

Wired notes that the US military has put out a tender for for a system to train soldiers based on their neural and cognitive responses.

Video from BBC News about a private clinic offering money to addicts to be sterilised – just arrived in the UK. Really quite screwed up.

BBC News quotes Dr Penelope Leach who says leaving babies to cry ‘harms their brains’. Talking shit apparently not a danger.

If you think she might have been taken out of context, here she is on YouTube hawking the same nonsense. ‘High cortisol’ apparently the danger. In which case, breast feeding would be ‘harming’ their brains too! No wonder my head hurts.

Salon has a review of a book on the neuropsychology of wisdom. Interesting, because wisdom is a strangely neglected topic in psychology.

Why Humans Have Sex. A podcast for the The New York Academy of Sciences oddly fails to mention wanting to check out people’s bookshelves. Maybe that’s just me?

Popular Science has a gallery of vintage robots. Old and rusty. As they should be.

Have you seen the Wiring the Brain blog? Bloody fantastic.

The New York Times publishes several letters responding to their recent article on standards in the US military’s war trauma units.

The Top 25 Psychiatric Prescriptions for 2009 are over at PsychCentral. Top 10 almost all anxiety and depression drugs. The non-specific malaise golden goose cashes in.

The New York Times has an intelligent piece by prominent psychiatrist Dan Carlat on the swing of the medication pendulum in American psychiatry.

A play about the ethics of brain scanning called Interior Traces is currently touring the UK.

BBC News and The New York Times have just each published articles on the US Army’s treatment of psychologically traumatised soldiers so different that you’d think they were talking about entirely distinct programmes.

Two articles have just appeared on the BBC website giving a very positive view of the US military’s treatment of Army veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health problems.

The articles largely focus on the programme at Fort Hood and despite some peculiarities (it mentions treatment includes acupuncture, reiki, sound therapy and seemingly chakra-based meditation) the picture is of a small but promising approach to treating psychologically disabled soldiers.

In contrast, The New York Times presents a damning picture of the treatment programme in which the service is poorly organised, where prescription and illicit drug abuse is rife and where clinicians rely largely on large doses of medication to manage soldiers’ symptoms.

It’s hard to know what to make of the articles, as the BBC seem to have made no effort to ask any difficult questions, while the NYT article seems to be largely based on interviews of soldiers who felt they were poorly dealt with, while the Army’s own surveys discussed in the piece suggest most are happy with the services.

The stuff about New Age treatments is just a bit odd. Is this where the First Earth Battalion have got to these days?

UPDATE: Thanks to PsychFun for pointing out they are, in fact, two distinct programmes! (Grabbed from the comments)

The WTU talked about in the NYT article is a military unit for wounded soldiers, many of whom have PTSD. The BBC article is talking about a 3 week intensive PTSD treatment program, as your own link shows. Darn those confusing US Army acronyms!

Link 1 and Link 2 to BBC News articles.
Link to New York Times article.

An innovative new study has analysed YouTube videos of people tripping on a hallucinogenic plant called salvia to understand the behavioural effects of the ‘legal high’ that is still relatively new to science.

Salvia divinorum is a strongly hallucinogenic plant that has been used by indigenous Mexican shamans for many centuries but has recently become popular as it is legal in many countries.

Pharmacologically, it is fascinating as it seems to have its major effect on kappa opioid receptors. These are not the same opioid receptors that drugs like heroin and morphine work on, so the effects are very different, but it is a completely different mechanism to virtually all other hallucinogenic drugs (only ibogaine is known to have a similar effect on the brain).

Especially at high doses it can have the effect of ‘switching off reality’ causing people to be disorientated and there are now thousands of videos on YouTube of people smoking salvia and experiencing the effects.

However, we know only a little about the plant because it is relatively new to science so a research team at San Diego State University, led by psychologist James Lange, decided to analyse these videos to understand the behavioural effects of the drug.

They created a systematic coding scheme which researchers used when watching the videos. This allowed them both to categorise the effects and check that each viewer was agreeing on what they saw.

After watching 34 videos, each of which was selected to show an entire trip from the initial hit to when the effects wore off, the team categorised the effects into five main groups:

(1) hypo-movement (e.g. slumping into a slouched position, limp hands, facial muscles slack or relaxed and falling down), (2) hyper-movement (e.g. uncontrolled laughter, restlessness, touching or rubbing the face without apparent reason or thought), (3) emotional effects included being visibly excited or afraid, (4) speech effects (unable to make sense, problems with diction, problems with fluency, inability to speak, and having problems recalling words) and finally (5) heating effects related to being hot or heated (e.g. flushed, or user makes a statement about being hot or sweating).

They also noted that the effects of are very quick, starting within thirty seconds of the first hit and wearing off completely in about 8 minutes. They also noted that the environment had little influence on the trip but the number of hits was linked to the amount of speech impairment caused by the drug.

In a previous Mind Hacks post about latah, a curious startle reflex localised to Malaysia and Indonesia, we noted that various videos of the phenomenon were available on YouTube, allowing for some ‘armchair anthropology’.

This is another example of this approach and shows how funny videos uploaded to the net can contribute to the understanding of atypical mental states.

pdf of full text of study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

There’s an excellent article on the history of the Multidiscplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organisation that has done much to bring psychedelic drug investigation back into the mainstream of medical research, in that well known bastion of science journalism, Playboy.

I must admit to being a bit embarrassed when I was caught reading the article as I usually only buy the magazine for the photo-shopped pictures of girls in bikinis.

For people who want to avoid such embarrassment the organisation has put a 10Mb pdf of the article online that is mostly safe for work (artistic depiction of flying topless woman with a statue’s head, wings and pills coming out of her ears – sounds better than it is).

The piece weaves together the history of the organisation with a somewhat alarming account of a young woman with terminal cancer being treated by an ‘underground psychedelic therapist’.

The account itself is quite touching, although the fact there are people going around giving terminally ill patients various powerful and illegal hallucinogenic drugs doesn’t inspire me with a great deal of confidence to say the least. However, it is an interesting look into this phenomenon, which, I have to say, was news to me.

In terms of the use of such drugs in clinical research, the article doesn’t really give a good analysis of the likely advantages and disadvantages of such an treatment (the studies so far are promising but small and poorly controlled) but is an interesting insight into how psychologist Rick Doblin make hallucinogenic drug research cautiously respectable again.

There seems to also be a bit of an upsurge in public interest in the topic over the last few days, with an article in The New York Times and a piece in Scientific American discussing these reality bending compounds.

pdf of article ‘The New Psychedelic Renaissance’ [10Mb] (via @mocost)

Madrid is one of the very few places in the world that has emergency response psychologists that attend the scene of accidents and disasters alongside the police, paramedics and fire crews. I recently interviewed Teresa Pacheco, one of the founders and current members of the Madrid team, about her work for the latest issue of The Psychologist.

Could you tell us a little about the psychology emergency response team in Madrid?

The SAMUR-Protección Civil emergency services are part of the Madrid municipal government, and at first the service was just focused on physical health. However, in 1999 we saw the need for specialist attention in dealing with complex psychological situations, and so a team of voluntary psychologists was created within SAMUR, principally responsible for passing on bad news to relatives after traffic accidents.

Because of the evolution of emergency psychology and the success of the team, in 2003 the psychology emergency response team was formally created. It consists of six people, on call 24 hours a day, for any psychological emergencies that might occur. To ensure an effective and consistent response we have developed procedures for a range of diverse situations for which a psychologist might be required, including extreme anxiety reactions, overdose, communicating bad news, child abuse, sexual violence, multiple victim accidents and large-scale catastrophes.

I first read about Teresa and her team in a 2008 article for the Spanish daily El País so it was a pleasure to be able to interview her one-to-one.

However, there are also two other freely available articles in the current issue of The Psychologist, both of which are excellent.

The first is an important piece on the psychology of homelessness by Christian Jarrett and the second is on the history of blindsight, a neurological condition where affected patients have no conscious experience of vision despite being able to direct automatic behaviours based on visual information.

Link to interview with photos and layout.
Link to interview in plain web format.
Link to article on the psychology of homelessness.
Link to article on the history of blindsight.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid associate editor and occasional columnist for The Psychologist and my psychological emergencies usually involve losing the remote control.

I attended the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education yesterday to discuss “What is the potential impact of technology, such as computer gaming, on the brain?” alongside Baronness Susan Greenfield and we were pleased to be able to present to a packed committee room.

I’ve never met Greenfield before, who was a big influence on me when I decided to become a neuropsychologist, and it was a genuine pleasure to meet her in person.

We started off the talks and it turns out we agree on quite a lot. Greenfield doesn’t want to ban computer games or internet applications but feels parents should be more involved in their kids’ media use to guide them to use it safely and sensibly. She also feels that most kids use technology well and get benefits from it but is concerned about the few that might “fall through the cracks”, or as I would describe them, the few who are a high risk group for unhealthy use.

It seems we agree on the implications, and it was clear the Greenfield is motivated by a genuine concern for young people.

Her talk was sincere, very well delivered but unfortunately her argument was poorly lacking in terms of its scientific content, and I’m afraid to say, wouldn’t pass muster as an undergraduate thesis. This was not least because she discussed not a single study on the effect of games or the internet.

I started my talk by searching PubMed, the database of medical research, to show that there are more than 1,500 published articles in the medical literature that directly discuss computer games.

Many of these studies investigate the concerns she has about whether games might be affecting attention spans or whether online communication could be harming the social life of young people, but she seems unwilling to consider any of them. For someone who is leading the public debate on this issue I find this, at best, baffling.

Greenfield’s justification is entirely based on the idea that young brains are sensitive to their environment, which shapes their development, and so any risks from screen technology might cause significant and unwanted neurological changes. This is, of course, plausible but cannot be evaluated in isolation from the studies that have directly tested the idea.

While I agree with the justification, I’m afraid I found her model of how this might occur also lacking. Not least as it had unspecified and too-broad-to-be-plausible aspects such as dopamine release, caused by gaming, leading to a reduction in frontal lobe activity.

If you want to see my talk, I’ve put the slides from my talk online as a PowerPoint file and apparently, both sets of slides will appear on the website of the Institute for the Future of the Mind shortly, possibly with video as the talks were filmed.

During the talk I made it clear that ignoring the evidence on this issue does a disservice to young people and discussed some of the key findings from the last few decades of research in this area – not least that action video games have been shown to improve cognitive function but that we should be concerned about content and age appropriateness (e.g. violence) and displacement of other activities (such as education, exercise and so on). I also discussed evidence showing that the internet seems to be benign or beneficial for the social lives of the majority of young people who use it.

Greenfield noted, however, that not all of her concerns are addressed by the studies I mentioned (for example, that computer games might affect the ability to use metaphor and understand abstract concepts) and that some, possibly unwanted, outcomes will just not be measurable. Even though I find some of her concerns a little far-fetched, she has a valid point on how we should be aware of the limits of what empirical research can deliver for complex social issues.

The discussion afterwards was lively and constructive. We had input from someone working on the Digital Economy Bill, a head teacher, a paediatrician, educationalists, a Lord who – against all my prejudices – clearly knew shit loads about computers and several people who just spoke from their experience as parents.

Afterwards, Greenfield invited everyone for a drink and was a funny and engaging host and I got the chance to thank her for inspiring me when I was starting out.

I have a different opinion of Greenfield after the debate, as I previously suspected she had been struck by reactionary technofear but was mistaken, as she does want children to benefit from technology. She obviously thinks a lot of internet culture is trash, but when you look at the constant stream of seemingly irrelevant in-jokes and funny cat videos, I can hardly blame her for this.

Nevertheless, I think her passion for helping young people has overtaken her obvious good sense as a scientist and a scholar on this issue, and I would join the call for her to write her ideas up for publication in a scientific journal both to clarify her position and to stimulate engagement with the large evidence base that she is currently unfamiliar with.

I have criticised Greenfield’s more alarmist public statements in the past, but with her passion and experience as a neuroscientist, a well-informed Baroness Greenfield would be a massive advantage to the debate on how we ensure children learn to manage technology to their best advantage.

ppt of slides from my talk.
Link to All Party Parliamentary Group description.

Full disclosure: The Institute of Psychiatry kindly helped fund my airfare and I wouldn’t have been able to attend without them, so many thanks for their support and belief in public and policy engagement.

I’m just about to go to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education to discuss “What is the potential impact of technology, such as computer gaming, on the brain?”.

It turns out Baroness Susan Greenfield will be talking first, followed by me, followed by a discussion with all in attendance.

After forgetting my tie and having to buy one from Tie Rack in Waterloo station, I am all ready to go. I’ll upload my slides afterwards and will report how it went.

Apologies if updates are a little irregular, as I’m currently on my way back to the UK for a three week visit. This is largely because I’ve been asked to speak to the ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scientific Research in Learning and Education’ about the evidence for whether computer games are damaging kids’ brains. I kid you not.

I shall also use the opportunity to catch up with the fantastic research group I’m associated with at the Institute of Psychiatry, but I’ll largely be sleeping on sofas, floors, buses, park benches and the like, so do forgive any irregularity or incoherence (although regular Mind Hacks readers seem quite well accustomed to both by now, and for some of you, I suspect it’s part of the attraction).

A new study has looked at the reliability of fMRI brain scanning results over time, finding that the same experiment will only only be moderately reproducible when conducted at two different times, suggesting that fMRI is much less reliable than most researchers assume.

The authors of the paper are the same ones who brought us the study showing that it’s possible to find ‘brain activity’ in a dead fish if the analysis is done in a way that is common but prone to false positives.

The paper will shortly appear in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences but they’ve put a copy online and, although it’s a scientific article, it’s remarkably easy to read.

They review all the studies to date on what is known as the ‘test-retest reliability‘ of fMRI. This refers to the ability of a measure to give reproducible results.

For example, if you’re measuring an adult’s height you want to make sure that your tape measure gives you similar results each time you use it on the same person. Of course, you may have readings that vary by a millimetre or two each time, but if you get wildly different results on Monday and Tuesday, you probably want to bin your tape measure.

In fMRI there are two types of results. One is ‘where in the brain’ and the other is ‘how strong’ is the activity.

We can examine the first by looking at how well the active brain areas overlap in scans taken at two different times, and we can examine the second by looking at the similarity of the strength of the results using a statistical test like a correlation.

The better the overlap and the statistical relationship between the results from the same test on the same people at different times, the more we can rely on our measurement technique.

This new analysis reviewed all the previous studies that have looked at the test-retest reliability of fMRI and found that overall, active brain areas overlap about 30% of the time and the correlation for the strength of the activity was about 0.5. To get some perspective a result of 1 would indicate perfectly reliable and reproducible results while a result of 0 would indicate no reliability at all.

An overlap of 30% and a correlation result of 0.5 shows fMRI has moderate reliability, but is much poorer than most people assume.

However, this overall result is perhaps a little too broad, and the authors make the point that the reliability varies depending on the type of scanner being used, what test is being carried out by the participants, what brain areas are being investigated and how the results are analysed.

Indeed, a recent study on the test-retest reliability of fMRI studies of the ‘reward system’ found the reproducibility of the results to be worse than this general figure while another study found an auditory detection task produced better results.

The authors conclude:

One thing is abundantly clear: fMRI is an effective research tool that has opened broad new horizons of investigation to scientists around the world. However, the results from fMRI research may be somewhat less reliable than many researchers implicitly believe. While it may be frustrating to know that fMRI results are not perfectly replicable, it is beneficial to take a longer-term view regarding the scientific impact of these studies. In neuroimaging, as in other scientific fields, errors will be made and some results will not replicate. Still, over time some measure of truth will accrue. This chapter is not intended to be an accusation against fMRI as a method. Quite the contrary, it is meant to increase the understanding of how much each fMRI result can contribute to scientific knowledge.

Link to full text of paper (via @hysell).