Category: News

Francisco Lacerda is a professor of phonetics and the author of an academic article criticising the use of the unproven voice analysis ‘life detector’ technology in the legal system. He highlighted “discrepancies between the claims the producers and vendors make and what their products are capable of delivering” and as a result, is now being threatened with a libel suit by a company that makes these devices.

The academic journal received similar threats and, rather disappointingly, has now taken the article offline.

But have no fear, a copy was grabbed from the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law before it disappeared and is now available online for all to read.

The article makes for interesting reading, as it looks at the claims and scientific basis of both specific products and the whole project of using voice stress for ‘detecting’ lies.

The company concerned are Nemesysco, who manufacture devices that supposedly detect lies by analysing speech patterns, despite the fact that there is no conclusive peer-reviewed evidence that the devices reliably detect untruths.

The company claim that their products works like this:

The technology detects minute, involuntary changes in the voice reflective of various types of brain activity. By utilizing a wide range spectrum analysis to detect minute changes in the speech waveform, LVA detects anomalies in brain activity and classifies them in terms of stress, excitement, deception, and varying emotional states, accordingly. This way, LVA detects what we call ‘brain activity traces,’ using the voice as a medium. The information that is gathered is then processed and analyzed to reveal the speaker’s current state of mind.

If that made no sense to you, read it again. It won’t make any more sense but it does get funnier.

Rather than presenting data showing that their devices work, the company is resorting to legal action to silence their critics.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments:

The article is quite unusual for a scientific article. For example, it has a section titled “who is Mr. Liberman?” addressing a private person and claiming that he is a charlatan based on a visit by a friend made to a private company.

Link to report of legal threat from Stockholm University.
Link to copy of pulled article.

The new edition of the excellent Scientific American Mind has just hit the shelves and several of the feature articles are freely available online – covering the psychology of play, some fascinating new research on the placebo effect, the quest to build a brain scan lie detector and several other fantastic reports.

I found the article on the cognitive benefits of free play particularly interesting. In this instance ‘free play’ is where kids are playing without set rules or requirements, as are needed when playing structured games or doing tasks.

The article is full of intriguing studies that indicate the immediate and long-term benefits of imaginative play. Even rough-and-tumble seems to be associated with better social skills:

Play fighting also improves problem solving. According to a paper published by Pellegrini in 1989, the more elementary school boys engaged in rough-housing, the better they scored on a test of social problem solving. During the test, researchers presented kids with five pictures of a child trying to get a toy from a peer and five pictures of a child trying to avoid being reprimanded by his mother. The subjects were then asked to come up with as many possible solutions to each social problem; their score was based on the variety of strategies they mentioned, and children who play-fought regularly tended to score much better.

As well as checking out the latest issue of SciAmMind, you may also want to have a look at a fantastic online gallery they’ve put together which captures numerous visual illusions that have been realised as 3D sculpures, some of epic proportions.

If you want to see some of M.C. Escher’s impossible staircases rendered in lego, or several impressive sculptures that change depending on the light or viewing angle, do have a look.

Link to Feb 2009 SciAmMind with plenty of freely available articles.
Link to visual illusions sculpture gallery.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer are about to settle a legal case brought by the US Government over illegal promotion of their now withdrawn painkiller Bextra (valdecoxib) for a staggering $2.3 billion.

This follows the news that Eli Lilly have just settled a similar case against them for a previous record of $1.42 billion related to illegal promotion of their antipsychotic drug Zyprexa (olanzapine) with several cases against them still ongoing.

The cases relate to ‘off-label marketing’, an illegal practice where companies explicitly encourage doctors to prescribe drugs for conditions that the compound isn’t licensed for. In the case of olanzapine, this included dementia, and we now know the combination of antipsychotics and dementia greatly increases short and longer-term mortality.

The practice of off-label promotion is widespread and has been for years but this is the first time that such massive cases have been settled against the companies concerned.

As an aside, one of the most useful sources for news on the pharma industry and psychiatry is a blog we often link to called Furious Seasons.

It’s written by Phil Dawdy, an ex-newspaper journalist and ex-antipsychotic user who does some remarkable investigative journalism that is almost entirely supported by donations from readers of the website.

I mention this as he’s just had another experience of a journalist pumping him for information and then neglecting to mention him, despite the fact that he’s not only been on the pulse of developments for the last few years, he’s actually been part of the story as he publicly hosted some incriminating documents for the Zyprexa case.

He was recently flagged up as a great example of independent web journalism by respected science writer David Dobbs, but only seems to get credit from writers who already get self-publishing.

I don’t always agree with his take but find Furious Seasons essential reading nonetheless, which must be a sign of a good writer.

I credit him with having a sort of underground sensibility for sorting through the spin of corporate psychiatry but it won’t be long before he goes mainstream, so catch him while he’s still live and direct.

Link to WSJ on Pfizer settlement.
Link to Furious Seasons.

I’ve just found a fantastic article that discusses the representation of epilepsy in contemporary rock and hip hop. It was published last year in the neurology journal Epilepsy and Behaviour and is both fascinating and funny owing to the contrast between the stuffy academic journal style and the lyrics drawn from the street.

For example, where else are you likely to read anything like the following:

In “Ballad of Worms,” Cage, a New York rap artist with a troubled psychiatric past, rails against God for giving his girlfriend (previously “the hottest bitch”) meningitis.

It’s a fascinating review, not least because most of the songs that mention epilepsy are from death metal bands, lyrical singer-song writers or hip hop artists.

I was a bit confused at first because it misses out some obvious tracks, but I quickly realised it’s just sampling from lyrics about epilepsy, rather than trying to give a complete overview.

For example, we mentioned a Beastie Boys track where Adrock gives props to his own epilepsy back in 2007. Beck also gives a nod to his epilepsy in his 2006 track Elevator Music:

I shake a leg on the ground
Like an epileptic battery man
I’m making my move

Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis famously developed epilepsy and had several seizures on stage. Their pulsing 1979 track She’s Lost Control, although not explicitly about his own experiences, vividly describes a girl having a seizure in the street.

There are many more examples, and after doing a search I was surprised at quite how often epilepsy and seizures are referenced in rock n’ roll.

The review notes that epilepsy is often linked to the historical themes of madness and cognitive impairment, but interestingly contemporary music also uses it as a metaphor for all consuming love and sexual desire, as well as wild abandon in dancing – which are not traditional themes.

The paper is by clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale, who does some compelling and diverse research into epilepsy, including a recent article on the representation of epilepsy in movies.

Link to ‘The representation of epilepsy in popular music’.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

The defenders of Bullshit Blue Monday tend to suggest that even if the formula is nonsense, it promotes awareness of mental health at a time of the year when people are feeling particularly low. In light of this, today’s Bad Science column discusses the research on mood and time of year and finds there’s no reliable link between season and depression.

The piece looks at studies of suicides, depression, prescriptions of antidepressants, mood changes and hospital admissions – and none show a reliable connection.

Goldacre concludes:

And worst of all, we know that lots of things really are associated with depression, like social isolation, stressful life events, neighbourhood social disorder, poverty, child abuse, and the rest. Get those in the news, I dare you. Suicide is the third biggest cause of life years lost. Anything real you could do to study the causes, and possible preventive measures, or effective interventions, would be cracking. Making stupid stuff up about the most depressing day of the year, on the other hand, doesn’t help anyone, because bullshit presented as fact is simply disempowering.

By the way, during previous Bullshit Blue Monday posts, I alluded to a researcher who was threatened with legal action by Cliff Arnall for criticising the formula.

As it happens, it was psychologist Petra Boyton and you can now read her account of being subject to below-the-belt nastiness.

To lighten the tone a little, I must point out my highlight of the whole media debacle: an article in The Scotsman who gave the date of Blue Monday as the 23rd 21st of January – a Wednesday.

Link to Bad Science on season, mood and Bullshit Blue Monday.
Link to Petra Boyton on formulas, science reporting and legal threats.

An interesting case series from the Babylon region of Iraq, reporting eight patients who had clinical lycanthropy where they had the delusional belief that they had changed into an animal. Seven believed they had changed into dogs, one believed he had changed into a cow.

Lycanthropy alive in Babylon: the existence of archetype.

Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2009 Feb;119(2):161-4; discussion 164-5. Epub 2008

Younis AA, Moselhy HF.

OBJECTIVE: Lycanthropy is the belief in the capacity of human metamorphosis into animal form. It has been recorded in many cultures. Apart from historic description of lycanthropy, there has been several case reports described in the medical literature over the past 30 years. METHOD: We identified eight cases of lycanthropy in 20 years, mainly in the area of Babylon, Iraq. RESULTS: The most commonly reported diagnosis was severe depressive disorder with psychotic symptoms. The type of animal that the patients changed into were mainly dogs (seven cases) and only one case changed into a cow for the first time to report. CONCLUSION: Lycanthropy delusion is a rare delusion but appears to have survived into modern times with possible archetypal existence.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘Lycanthropy alive in Babylon’.

A recent study hit the headlines reporting a link between caffeine intake and susceptibility to hallucinations. I’ve just read the paper and it’s an interesting well-conducted correlational study, but what struck me was the wackiness of the headlines it generated.

The study, led by researcher Simon Jones, was inspired by previous scientific work that has found a link between the stress-related hormone cortisol and psychosis.

Caffeine is known to interact with stress to increase cortisol levels further, so the researchers wondered whether there would be a direct link between caffeine intake and psychosis-type changes in thoughts and perception in people without a mental illness.

They asked 219 students to fill in well-validated standardised questionnaires relating to caffeine intake, stress, persecutory thoughts and hallucinatory experience and found that caffeine intake was associated with a small but reliable increase in susceptibility to hallucinations.

Actually, stress accounted for more hallucination susceptibility than caffeine, but as the first study to show an association between perceptual distortion and the world’s most popular stimulant in healthy people, it’s useful research.

I will now recount some of the headlines:

Coffee addicts see dead people

Caffeine, Responsible For Hallucinations

Did You See That Pink Elephant?

Too Much Coffee Can Cause You To Freak Out, Man

Coffee may make you see ghosts

Coffee linked to ‘visions’

‘Coffeeholics wake the dead’

If you think I’m cherry picking, these are actually fairly typical.

The news stories are a strange mix between an obsession with ghosts, which came from God knows where, and a profound confusion between correlation and causation.

UPDATE: I notice Bad Science has just picked up on the same study, and the same media obsession with ghosts, but also looks at a common element of the stories claiming that 7 cups of coffee a day ‘triples’ the risk of hallucinations – which didn’t appear in the paper but was apparently sourced from a bit of ad-hoc jiggery pokery for the press-release.

Link to DOI entry and study summary.
Link to sensible write-up from Science Daily.

Some of the researchers under fire from the recent ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’ article have responded to the accusations of misleading data analysis by suggesting that the accusers have misunderstood the finer points of brain imaging, leading them to falsely infer errors where none exist.

In an academic reply, available online as a pdf, and in an article on the controversy published in this week’s Nature, some of the researchers responsible for the ‘red list’ studies set out their case.

As you might expect, the responses are fairly technical points about statistical analysis in neuroimaging research but are generally well made, suggesting that the accusers don’t fully grasp which measures are related or unrelated, that they don’t account for tests which reduce spurious findings, and that they didn’t ask in sufficient detail about the methods used and so have based their analysis on incomplete information.

However, one in particular seems a little hopeful and relates to a central point made by Vul and his colleagues.

Vul suggested that the correlations shouldn’t exceed the maximum reliability of two measures. As we discussed previously, if you have two measures that are 90% reliable (accurate), on average, you wouldn’t expect correlations higher than 90% because the other 10% of the measurement is likely to be affected by randomness.

However, the response from neuroscientist Mbemba Jabbi and colleagues suggest that this should be based on the maximum reliability ever found.

Vul et al. argue that many of the brain-behavior correlations published in social neuroscience articles are “impossibly high” and that “the highest possible meaningful correlation that could be obtained would be .74”. This categorical claim is based on a statistical upper bound argument which relies on the questionable assumption that “fMRI measures will not often have reliabilities greater than about .7”. However, logically, any theoretical upper bound argument would have to be based on the highest reliability values ever reported for behavioural and fMRI data, respectively (e.g. for fMRI, near-perfect reliabilities of 0.98 have been reported in Fernandez et al. 2003).

I think they’ve caricatured the argument a little bit here. Vul’s point was that most studies suggest an average reliability of .7, therefore, it becomes increasingly unlikely as correlations exceed this limit that they reflect genuine relationships.

It’s not a ‘this is strictly impossible’ argument, it’s a ‘it’s too unlikely to believe’ argument.

However, the majority of ripostes, that Vul and his colleagues have misunderstood the analysis process, are quite a counterpunch to the heavyweight criticisms.

As an aside, there’s an interesting comment from neuroscientist Tania Singer on how the study has been discussed:

“I first heard about this when I got a call from a journalist,” comments neuroscientist Tania Singer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, whose papers on empathy are listed as examples of bad analytical practice. “I was shocked, this is not the way that scientific discourse should take place.”

Since when? The paper was accepted by a peer-reviewed journal before it was released to the public. The idea that something actually has to appear in print before anyone is allowed to discuss it seems to be a little outdated (in fact, was this ever the case?).

UPDATE: Ed Vul has replied to the rebuttal online. You can read his responses here (via the BPSRD which also has a good piece on the controversy).

It’s interesting that Vul’s reply essentially makes the counter-claim that the ‘red list’ researchers have misunderstood the analysis process.

This really highlights the point that neuroimaging analysis is not only at the forefront of the understanding of neurophysiology, but also at the forefront of the development of statistical methods.

In other words, the maths ‘aint obvious because the data sets are large, complex, and inter-related in ways we don’t fully understand. We’re still developing methods to make sense of these. This controversy is part of that process.

 
pdf of academic reply to ‘Voodoo correlations’ paper (thanks Alex!)
Link to excellent Nature article on the controversy.

Our Bullshit Blue Monday competition is so popular, even the PR company that promote the day have entered!

In a comment to our original post, one of the founders of Green PR has entered a formula into the competition, and includes a long-winded rant suggesting that our criticisms of the nonsense formula are “snide”, a “‚ÄòLord of the Flies‚Äô-like, vendetta”, and are “too hidebound by logic”.

I’ve added my response below the fold so everyone can enjoy the comedy gold.

By the way, this is your last chance to get your entries in for our competition to invent a formula that describes what total bullshit these formulas are. Either leave it as a comment on any of the Bullshit Blue Monday posts or email me via this web form.

The best entry gets a prize!

Continue reading “How does it feel?”

Wired reports that social scientists are being sought as contractors by the US Military to support their Africa Command in the form of a “socio-cultural cell”.

Rather than being directly employed by the US Army, as with members of the existing Human Terrain System (HTS), the cells look like they’ll be operated by risk management firm Archimedes Global – who, if the link from the article is correct, have a website that is so generic as to actually be slightly sinister.

The Wired news item cites a job ad, which isn’t online, but clearly describes a Human Terrain style set-up:

According to the job ad, the teams will work support AFRICOM’s Special Analysis Branch, which among other things will provide “operational multi-layered analysis and Joint Intelligence Preparations of the Operational Environment.” Cells will include personnel with expertise in “human terrain, all-source and Geo-spatial analysis.” A second socio-cultural cell will stand up within six months.

I am interested in why the US Military has recently begun to specifically deploy ‘Human Terrain’ teams to understand the structure of society when they already have an extensive PSYOPS service.

I found this fascinating 2004 defence report from the UK Government in the parliamentary records that describes the British military’s “information operations” that suggests that a ‘human terrain’ style focus, including the use of civilian social scientists, is already well integrated:

DTIO [Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations] provides strategic guidance on targeting and the cross-government information campaign, as well as advice to Ministers and the Chiefs of Staff. In DTIO itself, the staff of 98 includes a psychiatrist, an anthropologist and other specialist staff.

At the strategic level the British have been paying an American consultancy firm, the Redon Group, to provide advice on information campaigns for some five years. DTIO also has contacts with a variety of experts in the United Kingdom in universities and other institutions.

And as we discussed back in June, British PSYOPS already includes anthropology in its core techniques.

The report also hints that at the time, the US military was not addressing these issues, with a British Air Vice Marshal suggesting that the American forces were lacking a sensitive knowledge of the local cultures and that the UK forces were better at understanding the needs of the people.

However, it’s interesting that US military chose to address these issues by create a new ‘human terrain’ programme rather than simply assigning their existing PSYOPS units to the task.

Link to Wired on ‘Human Terrain’ teams for Africa.
Link to 2004 UK Government report on ‘Information Operations’.

The New Republic magazine has an excellent article about drug addiction among anaesthetists. It tracks the story of one rising star in the speciality who became addicted and discusses discussing why opioid dependence is still a problem in the field.

It’s probably worth stressing that while anaesthetists have the highest rates of opioid addiction among doctors, the absolute rates are still actually quite low.

A 2002 study found level of drug abuse in the US to be 1.0% among faculty members and 1.6% among residents (junior doctors), and ‘drug abuse’ here doesn’t entail addiction – it just describes illicit use of controlled substances.

However, the increased rates of drug use are certainly cause for concern, this is from a review article on ‘Addiction and Substance Abuse in Anesthesiology’ published last year:

Anesthesiologists (as well as any physician) may suffer from addiction to any number of substances, though addiction to opioids remains the most common. As recently as 2005, the drug of choice for anesthesiologists entering treatment was an opioid, with fentanyl and sufentanil topping the list. Other agents, such as propofol, ketamine, sodium thiopental, lidocaine, nitrous oxide, and the potent volatile anesthetics, are less frequently abused but have documented abuse potential. Alcoholism and other forms of impairment impact anesthesiologists at rates similar to those in other professions.

The New Republic article is an engaging look at this issue that manages to tackle both the human issues and the view from the medical literature.

If you’re interested in the history of anaesthesia, ABC Radio National’s In Conversation recently had a fascinating discussion with historian Stephanie Snow, who’s just written a book on the subject called Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia.

It has loads of intriguing nuggets of information, such as the fact that resistance to the introduction to effective pain killing was bolstered by moral arguments as to the necessity of pain, but also scientific theories about the nervous system that suggested it was essential during operations to keep the body functioning.

A fascinating insight into early thinking about the value of pain.

Link to The New Republic article ‘Going Under’ (via MeFi).
Link to In Conversation on ‘Blessed Days Of Anaesthesia’.

(28 Dec 2011: updated links – thanks Tom!)

A study just published online by the journal Schizophrenia Research has found a marked relationship between insomnia and paranoia in both the general public and in patients with psychosis.

The study, led by psychologist Daniel Freeman, was cross-sectional, meaning they just looked at whether the two things were associated and so it can’t say for definite which causes which.

In other words, it’s impossible to say whether lack of sleep triggers paranoia, or whether paranoid thoughts are more likely to keep us up at night.

However, the study also measured anxiety, known to affect sleep, and it accounted for part but not all of the sleeplessness, suggesting that both paranoia and insomnia probably feed into each other.

Sleep has an interesting relationship to mental illness. While sleeplessness and disturbed circadian rhythms have been linked to mood disorders for many years, sleep deprivation is known to have an antidepressant effect and is sometimes used to treat the most severe cases of depression.

By the way, the title of the post is taken from the lyrics to Faithless’ dancefloor masterpiece Insomnia which also gives a wonderful description of insomnia fuelled paranoia – although I suspect it also refers to the after effects of a night of drugs-based clubbing so probably not exactly what the researchers had in mind.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Full disclosure: Two of the study authors are research collaborators.

Is this the most incompetent Wikipedia edit ever? Green Communications, the PR company who promotes the Blue Monday ‘worst day of the year’ bullshit festival, recently tried to ‘anonymously’ delete criticism from the Blue Monday Wikipedia page without realising their IP address was a complete giveaway.

This obviously failed, and they just tried to paste on a whole block of text onto the bottom of the article that started with (and I kid you not):

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT IS ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT. IF YOU DISPUTE IT PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR.

Spank me nanny! Spank me!

Actually, they originally tried to do this from an anonymous IP address that didn’t track back to Green Communications, but then blew their cover by using a registered account to reinsert the text – time under the name ‘Honest Green’ and with the added power caps.

Now, I’m going to assume that the information is ALL FACTUALLY CORRECT so I want to address the last line of their bolt-on Wikipedia press release:

The on-going campaign is run by Wakefield-based public relations company GREEN Communications, on a non-commercial basis as part of its own corporate social responsibility activities.

Let’s make this clear. Green Communications – I applaud your efforts for running non-commercial PR campaigns aimed at promoting mental health. It’s a vastly neglected area that gets scant attention in the press.

However, the reason that the ‘Blue Monday’ / worst day of the year formulae rubbish gets the back up of medical doctors, psychologists and researchers is not just that it’s ridiculous.

It’s that promoting the misunderstanding of science and psychology actually harms people’s ability to make informed choices about their mental health.

It devalues genuine evidence-based work in the area and misleads people as to what they need to consider when trying to manage their own emotions, or, if the need arises, decide on what sort of help or treatment they want when things get too difficult to manage their own.

So, I’d like nothing more than next year, you run a non-commercial PR campaign aimed at empowering and informing people about depression that wasn’t based on misinformation.

You’re an award winning PR company, so I’m sure you can find an equally catchy way of grabbing people’s attention that doesn’t involve obvious drivel.

UPDATE: Just a reminder that you can still enter our Bullshit Blue Monday make up your own nonsense formula competition where you could win a prize!

Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Ben Goldacre.
Link to Bullshit Blue Monday antidote from Petra Boyton.

A new study has found that laughing gas, a common anaesthetic used by dentists, increases the vividness of imagination and also increases suggestibility, making people slightly more likely to experience hypnosis-like suggestions.

The study, just published in the medical journal Psychopharmacology, stems from the informal observations of dentists that patients under laughing gas (nitrous oxide) sedation are particularly suggestible and the researchers aimed to test this out in more detail.

The researchers randomised patients at a dental surgery to either receive a nitrous oxide and oxygen mix, or just oxygen, with the patients not knowing which they were receiving. Two weeks later they were invited back and given which ever type of gas mix they hadn’t already had.

While inhaling each gas mix, the participants were asked to complete a measure of imaginative ability, rating the clarity and vividness of their visual imagery, as well as being given various suggestions – without the hypnotic induction – from the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale.

This includes suggestions that your hands might move of their own accord, to suggested temporary paralysis, to a suggestion to experience hallucinated sounds – to name but a few.

The researchers found that nitrous oxide boosted imaginative ability considerably, and increased suggestibility modestly but reliably.

The paper discusses the small but interesting literature on which drugs affect suggestibility, and reviews some of the past studies which have tested some quite surprising substances in this way:

Little research has investigated the effects of other drugs upon suggestibility in a controlled manner. Sjoberg and Hollister (1965) administered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline and psilocybin separately and in combination to participants and measured imaginative suggestibility before and after drug administration.

Gibson et al (1977) measured the effect of benzodiazepine administration upon hypnotic suggestibility, and Kelly et al (1978) tested the effect of cannabis intoxication upon the imaginative suggestibility of participants initially scoring low to medium on a standardised scale.

Details of these studies and the resulting changes in suggestibility are given in Table 2 [see further down this page for a web version]. The greatest changes in suggestibility, in order of decreasing size, are evident after administration of nitrous oxide, cannabis, LSD, mescaline, combination of [LSD+mescaline+psilocybin] and diazepam.

So it seems that nitrous oxide may have a particular suggestibility boosting effect.

By the way, the study was led by psychologist Matt Whalley, who also runs the excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website, undoubtedly the best internet resource for scientific information on hypnosis.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to excellent Hypnosis and Suggestion website.

The Neurocritic has an excellent post explaining the science of why some of the most widely reported brain scanning studies on social interaction are flawed.

The new analysis has been led by neuroscientist Edward Vul and we reported on this bombshell last week, but this new post clearly explains the problems for those not wanting to plough through the original academic text.

The paper stems from the observation that some of the correlations between brain activity and psychological states in some of these headline studies are remarkably high, one as high as .88

A correlation is a test of how much two measures are related. A correlation of 1 means that the two measures are perfectly in sync, every change in one is mirrored by changed in the other, whereas a correlation of 0 means that there is no syncing at all. Any number in between gives a sliding scale of how much ‘syncing’ there is .

So a correlation of .88 is pretty impressive and suggest near-perfect syncing. Except that it’s higher than would be possible based on how accurate the two measures are.

Imagine that you have a 10cm rule than can only measure to the nearest centimetre. It means that the accuracy of your ruler is only 90% because it fudges any part-centimetre length down the nearest centimetre.

It would be almost impossible to get a perfect correlation using this ruler, because there’s 10% randomness – or 10% out-of-syncness, in every measurement.

And once you know how much randomness there is, you can estimate the maximum correlation you can get because you know the randomness is not going to reliably sync with anything else.

Edward Vul and his team did this with these headline social brain imaging studies and found that some produced correlations higher than would be possible from what we know of how accurate the brain scanning and psychological measures are. So something must be up.

It turns out that some studies deliberately picked out brain areas based on which voxels [micro areas] already had high correlations, while others only reported correlations from a spot in an area that was already the most active.

In other words, they were only selecting the cream of the crop but were reporting it as if it was the general picture.

Neurocritic goes into this in more detail in relation to specific studies, and it’s well worth checking out for the gory details.

Importantly, the researchers of the flawed studies weren’t trying to ‘fake’ results, there were using a common method which Vul has discovered is flawed.

He has called for the researchers to use a more representative form of analysis and correct their findings. We’ll see what happens.

Link to Neurocritic on ‘Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience’.
pdf of Vul’s paper.

This month’s British Journal of Psychiatry has another one of its regular ‘…in 100 words’ series – this month giving a concise guide to ‘psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry’.

It’s written by psychiatrist and historian of psychopharmacology David Healy, who’s had more than his fair share of heat from the drug industry.

Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry – in 100 words

Little Pharma made profits by making novel compounds; Big Pharma does it by marketing. Doctors say they consume (prescribe) medication according to the evidence, so marketeers design and run trials to increase a drug’s use. They select the trials, data and authors that suit, publish in quality journals, facilitate incorporation in guidelines, then exhort doctors to practise evidence-based medicine. Because ‘they’re worth it’, doctors consume branded high-cost but less effective ‘evidence-based’ derivatives of older compounds making these drugs worth more than their weight in gold. Posted parcels meanwhile are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.

Link to psychiatry and the pharma industry in 100 words at the BJP.