Category: Nonsense

I like Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist and director of science education charity the Royal Institution, but recently she’s lost the plot. Bad Science picks up on her recent crusade to warn everyone about the potentially ‘brain damaging’ effects of computer games and the internet in the face of absent or contradictory evidence.

And when I say I like her, I genuinely do. Not least because she wrote Brain Story probably the finest neuroscience documentary series ever produced, presented the Christmas Lectures in a red leather cat suit, and replied to me when I was a lowly MSc student after I emailed her following a talk she did on consciousness.

But she’s got a bee in her bonnet about computers and the internet, and keeps making headline grabbing pronouncements that are completely divorced from the actual science.

She keeps warning about the ‘neurological dangers’ of electronic media, saying that it might be causing ADHD, obesity, social impairments and the like, despite not citing a single study on the topic.

In this month’s Wired UK she argues that the credit crunch could have been caused by bankers brain damaged by computer games they played as children.

Her arguments almost always take a similar form: computers are about the “here and now” (whatever that means), frontal lobe damage makes people impulsive, children play computer games and experience affects brain development, therefore children could be being brain damaged by computer games.

Apart from the obvious problem with the logic, studies actually on computer use and attention, or computer use and social functioning actually tend to show that people who have experience of electronic media generally show slight benefits in these areas.

This evidence seems to have entirely passed her by. In her chapters on the ‘dangers’ of electronic media in her (surprise, surprise) recently published new book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century she cites not a single study that shows a negative effect of computers on the mind or brain.

And in fact, Greenfield has promoted, wait for it, some ‘brain training’ software that she claimed improved mental performance.

Now, I’ve got no problem having wacky theories, or even reasonable fears, but if you’re the head of a science education charity you should at least read the literature. Oh, and refrain from promoting scare stories.

Link to Bad Science on Greenfield digital worry mongering.

The Sunday Times has one of the most gullible neuroscience articles I’ve read in a very long time. While most mainstream press articles are happy to make a hash of one study at a time, this manages to misinterpret virtually every headline-grabbing neuroscience experiment from the last couple of years.

The article claims that neuroscience is much more advanced than we realise and sets out to demonstrate this by over-interpreting recent discoveries, padding the article with false information, and using fallacies to discuss the implications.

It’s full of howlers:

Then, in the 1980s, a range of new technologies began to emerge, including positron emission tomography (Pet) computerised axial tomography (Cat) and, perhaps the best known, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

PET was invented in the late 1960s / early 1970s, CAT was invented at virtually the same time, and fMRI was invented in the 1990s.

In a simplistic example, a scientist might show a picture of a scantily-clad woman to a man, and then see the parts of the brain associated with sex and lust lighting up as they consumed more oxygen. Meanwhile, the areas linked to reasoning and morality might go dark as they rapidly shut down.

I’m not sure whether “simplistic example” is a malapropism, a Freudian slip, or a grim admission of the the nonsense to come. Not only is the description of the technique completely misleading (all functional scans are comparisons between different situations, not just a measure of one reaction) but the example is completely bizarre.

The piece then goes on to suggest that neuromarketing gives a better idea how to market products (not one example to date), that brain scanning is a form of advanced lie detection (so advanced it doesn’t work very well) and that studies on the neuroscience of criminal behaviour (like writing crap brain articles) “suggest it could be wrong to hold such people responsible for their actions” (you wish).

I can’t face going through the rest of the examples because I keep weeping over my computer, but look out for the ‘this complex human attribute = this one brain area’ drivel, a profound confusion where brain activation is used to justify a behavioural or psychological conclusion, and the invention of the term “brainjacking” which is reported as if it’s already used.

I also noted that one of the quotes has just been lifted from other news reports.

Perhaps its only redeeming feature is that it could be a useful teaching aid if you’re giving a class on how neuroscience gets misrepresented in the media because it has at least virtually every type of slip-up in one handy place.

Link to ropey Sunday Times article.

This is a beautiful butterfly brain greetings card, created by graphic designer TweeK. I’d never would have imagined that an MRI scan and butterflies would go together so effortlessly, and the effect is quite stunning.

You can buy copies of the card online, so you can impress the hardest-to-impress of your brain-inclined friends, or you can just visit the page to see it in more detail.

I can’t stop looking at it.

Fantastic.

Link to TweeK’s butterfly brain greetings card.

The Onion has a video of a funny spoof news report on “Should We Be Doing More To Reduce The Graphic Violence In Our Dreams?”

It gets a little bit gory towards the end, so if that’s not your thing, you may prefer another one of their recent reports on the news that “70 percent of all praise is sarcastic”.

Link to ‘Should We Be Doing More To Reduce The Violence In Our Dreams?’
Link to ’70 Percent of All Praise is Sarcastic’.

I’ve just found an entry for a delightful looking study on PubMed entitled ‘Size of Easter egg drawings before and after Easter’.

Unfortunately, the paper isn’t available electronically so we’ll never know whether the Easter egg drawings grew, shrunk and stayed the same over the Easter holiday.

However, we do know from a 1993 study that the famous rabbit / duck ambiguous picture is more likely to be recognised as a rabbit during Easter.

Link to entry for ‘Size of Easter egg drawings before and after Easter’
Link to entry for ‘The Easter bunny in October: is it disguised as a duck?’

Brain Ads is a web business where you can pay for your product promotion to be telepathically sent to anyone, and indeed, everyone, on the planet. I’ve yet to work out whether the guy is joking or serious.

It has been a long journey to discover that people were reading my mind, and although I came to think this already 7 years ago, everyone denied it. I was even given drugs without my knowledge. It all came down to trusting myself and accepting what I was experiencing.

Slowly I have explored the repercussions that having this ability has had on my life. Consequently, I also began to understand how other people had been using my ablity for their own personal, financial and emotional purposes.

As I realized that TV shows were following my daily thoughts and stores began bringing products I had been wishing for, it finally dawned on me that they were not just teasing me, they were actually getting more viewers and selling more products!

Everyone seemed to be getting a share of the bounty except me!

It’ll cost you $2,000 USD to have your one page advert sent to the world telepathically. Actually, it’s pretty cheap for the advertising world and at least it’s better value for money than a neuromarketing company.

And if that’s not your sort of brain advert, Street Anatomy have a gallery of print adverts that have used some rather nifty brain images.

I recommend click on the images in the gallery, as full size, the pictures are even more impressive.

Link to Brain Ads web business.
Link to Street Anatomy brain adverts gallery (via @mocost).

I’ve just discovered some important psychological research on cartoons, which, I think, has an important social message for us all.

A 1983 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that cartoon violence is hilarious, no matter whether you’re adult or child, native or foreign, rich or poor, cat or mouse.

More aggressive cartoons are funnier

McCauley C, Woods K, Coolidge C, Kulick W.

J Pers Soc Psychol. 1983 Apr;44(4):817-23.

Independent rankings of humor and aggressiveness were obtained for sets of cartoons drawn randomly from two different magazines. The correlation of median humor and median aggressiveness rankings ranged from .49 to .90 in six studies involving six different sets of cartoons and six different groups of subjects, including children and adults, high and low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals, and native- and foreign-born individuals. This correlation is consistent with Freudian, arousal, and superiority theories of humor. Another prediction of Freudian theory, that high-SES subjects should be more appreciative of aggressive humor than low-SES subjects, was not supported.

This is a proud day for the Acme Corporation.

Link to PubMed study on the funniness of aggressive cartoons.

Conch Tees have a wonderfully philosophical or worryingly paranoid t-shirt that reads “Everybody can read minds except you!”.

It’s got an unwrapping brain in the centre, and the company claims it refers to conspiracy theories about other people reading your thoughts.

However, it could also be a reference to the problem of other minds, a key philosophical issue in the understanding of consciousness.

As consciousness is a first-person subjectively experienced state, we can never know whether other people are conscious, or even what their minds are like, so we just have to make our best guess from what they say and do.

They don’t say they can read minds, but they wouldn’t, would they?

Link to Conch Tees mind reading t-shirt.

Don’t Believe the Hype by hip hop group Public Enemy has a line which is often misheard as “I don’t rhyme for the sake of Ritalin”, when, in fact, the lyrics say “I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin'”.

I’ve just noticed that The Roots‘ track False Media, gives a clever nod to this perceptual miscue to make a point about the drug itself.

Eleven million children are on Ritalin
That’s why I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’

Link to False Media lyrics.

James Brewer suffered a stroke and, thinking he was dying, confessed to a murder he had committed thirty years earlier in his hospital bed. Like the majority of people who suffer stroke, he recovered and has now been charged with murder.

From BBC News:

A US man who thought he was dying and confessed to having killed a neighbour in 1977 has been charged with murder after making a recovery, US media say.

James Brewer could now face the death penalty over the unsolved killing in Tennessee 32 years ago, reports say.

Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted to police he shot dead 20-year-old Jimmy Carroll.

The 58-year-old, who had fled Tennessee after the killing, was arrested after his condition improved, reports say.

Lest you find yourself in the same situation, you may like to know that the stroke mortality rates have fallen dramatically in recent decades.

Link to BBC News story.
Link to story in The Telegraph.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher has done some fascinating work on the neuroscience of love and romantic relationships, but she hooked up with the dating site Match.com a few years back and seems to have lost the plot a bit, or at the very least, is being taken for a ride by their PR department.

Match.com’s press releases regularly get in the news as ‘science’ stories and the latest ones are doozies. You could not think of a more prefect storm of celebrity gossip, relationships, and junk science.

People have one of four chemicals in their brain that moulds romantic chemistry, scientists explain.

In ‘builders’ like Aniston, serotonin is the dominant chemical, making them calm and cautious.

‘Explorers’, like Brad Pitt, meanwhile, are led by dopamine, creating a more spontaneous and risk-taking romancer.

And, yes, you’ve guessed it, Brad’s current partner Angelina Jolie is an ‘explorer’, too.

Professor Helen Fisher, an expert in the science of love, said: ‘It’s possible to scientifically understand why people partner better with certain types.’

Possible, but presumably, unprofitable.

Actually, there has been some work correlating relationship or attachment style to the genetics of neurotransmitter receptors.

However, the concept of a ‘dominant chemical’ makes no sense at all and Fisher’s categories have been made up by her and are not used by anyone else.

Saying that, my dominant chemical is caffeine. Which makes my ideal partner… an energy drink?

Link to study summary on relationship style and genetics.
Link to study summary on attachment style and genetics.

(Thanks Petra!)

So what is it with all the Freud impersonators on Twitter? I’ve found six so far:

Sigmund Freud. Austrian psychiatrist.

Sigmund Freud. I am the father of psychoanalysis.

sigmund freud.

Sigmund Freud. How does that make you feel?

sigmund_freud. [In French].

sigmund. [In Russian].

If you’d rather another style of analysis, there are also Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung impersonators.

Everyone else is using it to free associate and they’re using it for wish fulfilment. What gives?

The International Herald Tribune has an unintentionally funny opinion piece where a rather poorly informed journalist publicly wets his pants about ‘thought-decoding brain-scan technology’ which, apparently, the police could be carrying in the future so they’ll know if you’re thinking rude things about them.

When the police stopped me for running a red light recently, I was thinking “Don’t you cops have anything better to do?” But the words that came out of my mouth were a lot more guarded, something like, “Sorry, I thought it was green.” Sometimes it’s good to play the dumb foreigner.

The policewoman, a tough lady smoking a cigarette, glared at me. Was she reading my mind? No, I guess not, because she only gave me a warning. But beware, in a few years she might actually carry a device that can do that.

Research is rapidly advancing to allow thought-decoding through brain-scan technology, and it scares me to death. I don’t want anyone else in my head, and certainly not the police.

It’s a masterpiece of superficial reading of the scientific evidence and interpreting it in the most unrealistic and panicky way possible.

Link to IHT piece ‘Watch what you think’.

Jones GABA a slickly advertised new energy drink that contains the neurotransmitter GABA, described as enhancing “focus + clarity” and putting you “in the zone”. It is backed by ‘one of the world’s leading authorities on natural medicine’ Dr Michael Murray, who seems completely unaware that GABA doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier and so drinking it is unlikely to have any effect.

The active ingredient in the drink is called ‘Pharma GABA’, which, despite the ‘Pharma’ prefix is just powdered GABA, commercially sold, normally as a ‘nutritional supplement’.

This has actually been subject to research, albeit in a poorly controlled trial of 13 people in one experiment, and two groups of four people in another. It used surrogate outcomes (measuring saliva and EEG) rather than actually measuring stress or focus and was completed by the company that sells the product.

But even without this experimmercial, we can be pretty sure that swallowing GABA doesn’t work, because, despite various experiments that have investigated the neurotransmitter, it has never been found to cross the blood-brain barrier in any significant way.

However, this isn’t the first junk food product to include neurotransmitters as a gimmick. We found some Japanese GABA sweets for sale last year.

I have to say, I love the geekiness of having neurotransmitter junk food, but it would be infinitely better if it wasn’t packaged with junk science.

It would also be infinitely better if it was highly caffeinated, but that’s just a personal opinion.

Link to GABA in a can spoilt by the pseudoscience (thanks Sara!)

The following is from a recent New York Times article on how snack food company Frito-Lay have based their latest women-focused campaign on ‘neuromarketing’. Parts of the article nearly made with weep with despair.

[Advertising agency] Juniper Park used neuromarketing in a slightly different way. Ms. Nykoliation began by researching how women’s brains compared with men’s, so the firm could adjust the marketing accordingly. Her research suggested that the communication center in women’s brains was more developed, leading her to infer that women could process ads with more complexity and more pieces of information.

Hang on a minute. Communication centre larger in women? She doesn’t mean… the crockus by any chance?

A memory and emotional center, the hippocampus, was proportionally larger in women, so Ms. Nykoliation concluded that women would look for characters they could empathize with.

Stop sniffing the TipEx.

And research Ms. Nykoliation read linked the anterior cingulate cortex, which processes decision-making and was larger in women, to feelings of guilt. (Experts differ on how directly functions or feelings are associated with various parts of the brain.) Ms. Nykoliation then asked NeuroFocus to review her assumptions and, as Juniper Park developed ads, to test the ads to verify that women liked them.

We should have guessed a ‘neuromarketing’ company would be involved.

Neuromarketing is an interesting research field looking at the neuroscience of buyer decisions but so far there is not a single scrap of data that shows neuroscience can better predict buyer decisions that plain old ‘marketing’.

In other words, if you’re wanting to actually market a product, it’s a huge waste of money. However, that hasn’t stopped various ‘neuromarketing’ companies from springing up and selling their sweet nothings to large corporations for hard cash.

I say a huge waste of money, but it did get them a feature in The New York Times who also posted their commercial online, so maybe it’s not such a daft move after all.

Link to NYT article.

I just found this photo in the Life magazine archive. It’s from 1966 and entitled ‘MIT student using a MAC computer for project study of artificial intelligence’.

Is it me, or does the young student bear an uncanny resemblance to Anthony Michael Hall in the 80s film Weird Science where two computer geeks use an early micro computer to programme their ideal woman in the form of the lovely Kelly LeBrock?

Unfortunately, I can’t find any of the classic images of the boys at their computer creating the digital Ms LeBrock for you to compare, but here’s one where you can see the uncanny MIT photo / Weird Science similarity.

So just what were MIT researching in the mid-60s?

UPDATE: We have another photo! Thanks to Daniel for suggesting this one.

Link to photo in Life archive.