The fMRI smackdown cometh

Over the last few months, the soul searching over the shortcomings of fMRI brain scanning has escaped the backrooms of imaging labs and has hit the mainstream.

Numerous articles in hard hitting publications have questioned some common assumptions behind the technology, suggesting a backlash against the bright lights of brain scanning is in full swing.

There are two strands to this debate, and both stem from the fact that the technology and conceptual issues of brain imaging are incredibly complex.

To fully understand what happens during a brain imaging experiment you need to be able to grasp quantum physics at one end, to philosophy of mind at the other, while travelling through a sea of statistics, neurophysiology and psychology. Needless to say, very few, if any scientists can do this on their own.

So the first strand involves how brain imaging experiments are reported in the media. Under the sheer weight of conceptual strain, journalists panic, and do this: “Brain’s adventure centre located”.

It’s a story published this morning on the BBC News website based on an interesting fMRI study looking at brain activity associated with participants choosing a novel option in a simple gambling task. But out of the four words of the headline, only the first is accurate.

And this leads to the second strand of the debate, which, until recently, has been largely conducted away from the media’s gaze, amongst the people doing cognitive science themselves.

It starts with this simple question: what is fMRI measuring?

When we talk about imaging experiments, we usually say it measures ‘brain activity’, but you may be surprised to know that no-one’s really sure what this actually means.

Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis published an important paper in Nature a couple of weeks ago explaining exactly what we know so far about the link between what brain scans measure and what the brain is actually doing.

It’s very wide-ranging and includes lots of grit-your-teeth hardcore neurophysiology, but is, I think, essential reading if you’re neuroscientifically inclined.

It focuses on BOLD, the signal that reflects the ratio of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood measured by fMRI, and the fact that it can be altered by a huge range of different biological process and neural firing patterns.

One of the main points of the paper is that the brain is not simply an array of tiny localised processors, but it is more like an an ecosystem of communication.

Activity can result from sending more signals, trying to send less, or, from what seems to be particularly important – maintaining a balance of excitation and inhibition.

Furthermore, it seems that a great deal of neural activity is not from neurons that might be directly involved in a task, but from ‘neuromodulation’ – general processes of management and coordination, often linked to attention. This can wax and wane, can spread like ripples and can occur in all sorts of non-linear ways that makes interpretation difficult.

What this means is that brain imaging experiments need to be carefully designed to control for these effects, but this entirely depends on our understanding of the effects themselves.

In other words, our understanding of what brain scanning data tells us evolves over time. A study conducted ten years ago might mean something different now.

An article in Science, published in the same week as Logothetis’ paper, reports on new statistical methods for interpreting imaging data, a different issue again.

The latest edition of The New Atlantis has an article that attempts to come to grips with some of the philosophical aspects of brain imaging experiments, in terms of the conceptual limits in inferring mental states from biological changes.

I have to say, it’s a bit miscued in places, assuming that brain imaging relies on ideas about brain modularity (which it doesn’t) and seemingly confusing it with the notion of pure insertion, and suggesting some rather strange notions about mental causation, but it has many good points and is worth a read.

It’s important that these sorts of issues come to light, because it hopefully heralds a time of increased caution in our interpretation of brain scans – and that goes for scientists, the media and the general public.

This is essential, because this data is starting to be used, literally, in life or death decisions.

The same issue of The New Atlantis has an article on neuroimaging that discusses the ethical dilemmas in applying this imperfect technology to legal decisions concerning capital punishment.

Link to Logothetis on ‘What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI’.
Link to Science article ‘Growing pains for fMRI’.
Link to New Atlantis on ‘The Limits of Neuro-Talk’.
Link to New Atlantis on Neuroimaging and Capital Punishment.

Works like a charm

The March edition of HR Magazine has an unintentionally hilarious cover article on ‘The Brain at Work’ which informs us that we can ‘squirt’ neurotransmitters into each others’ brains, tell us how we can reboot dendrites and is strangely obsessed with the basal ganglia.

It’s full of fantastic howlers and misplaced metaphors which you’ll have the pleasure of discovering for yourselves, but the stuff about the basal ganglia is just plain odd.

Tired of listening to her employees vent, she told them, “No longer will I listen to a problem unless you submit at least a portion of the solution.”

Weber explains what happened next in neuroscientific terms: “The next day, the basal ganglia were at work continuing to vent about the problems with no solution.” One employee went to the HR professional’s office. He didn’t have a solution, so she sent him away.

“About three days later, workers realized she was serious. So, a different person went into her office with a solution to the problem. The HR professional agreed to and supported the solution put forward with slight revisions to keep it under budget.”

That simple change transformed the employees’ dynamics — and their brains — by turning control over to them. “The conversation in the basal ganglia went from problem-focused to solution-focused,” says Weber. “When people in that department went to sleep at night, they rewired their brains for the new behaviors.”

Let’s just pause there for a moment.

Nope, it doesn’t help.

The curious thing is that the article is generally full of quite sensible advice for managing employees but its just wrapped up in this bizarre alternative universe neurobabble.

Somehow we’ve got to the point where people feel they can’t give good advice without waving poorly-understood neuroscience around like it was a recently enlarged willy.

Link to ‘The Brain at Work’.

The science of theory

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has written an excellent piece on experimental philosophy, the practice of testing out philosophical ideas by using experiments or gathering data.

Now, the more astute of you might be thinking, “isn’t that just science?”, and, you’d be right. Sorta.

Schwitzgebel makes the important point that lots of the things that are taken for granted in the philosophy of mind, like what it is like to have have certain conscious experiences, haven’t actually been examined to see how widely these assumptions or experiences are shared.

Partly, he notes, because psychology is too scared about being called unscientific to start returning to introspection, and partly because philosophers are the ones most concerned about these issues.

In the philosophy of perception, there‚Äôs a long-standing dispute between those who think that our concepts and categories thoroughly permeate and infect even the most basic perceptual experiences and those who hold that people with very different understandings of a scene may still have exactly the same perceptual experience of it…

Such phenomenological claims have two things in common with claims about what’s intuitive that make them ripe for inclusion under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”: First, it is mainly philosophers who make such claims; and second, there is no substantial tradition outside of philosophy dedicated to the empirical evaluation of the claims.

These facts may be mere historical accident: Back in the days of introspective psychology, psychologists loved to dispute issues of this sort. But fortunately or unfortunately, psychology still has not sufficiently rebounded from the behaviorist revolution that such general phenomenological claims are broadly discussed by mainstream psychologists.

If you consider tradition of phenomenological philosophy, which aims to describe the subjective structure of the mind, it’s striking that it’s been almost entirely based on philosophers’ own intuitions about their mental states, which they then extrapolate to everyone else.

Schwitzgebel also suggests that experimental philosophy could be used for exploring an anthropology of philosophy. In other words, how culture affects our general assumptions about how the mind works.

I have looked at the relationship between culture-specific metaphors and the prevalence of certain views about conscious experience. To highlight some of my own work: Are people (including philosophers) more likely to say that dreams rarely contain colored elements if the film media around them are predominantly black and white? Are people more likely to say that a circular object (such as a coin) viewed obliquely looks elliptical if the dominant media for describing vision are media like paintings and photographs that involve flat, projective distortions?

Of course, there’s a big overlap with psychology here, but the fact is, psychologists just aren’t that interested gathering the data that philosophers would often find most useful, and so they’re setting about gathering it themselves.

The first book on experimental philosophy was recently published, and Schwitzgebel’s article is a fantastic introduction, as well as an eye-opening look at the possibilities of philosophers armed with clipboards.

Link to article ‘The Psychology of Philosophy’.

Gazzaniga on split-brains and bioethics

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the founding fathers of cognitive neuroscience and a pioneer of ‘split brain’ research, is interviewed on this week’s ABC All in the Mind where he talks about the use and abuse of ‘left brain – right brain’ metaphors and how our understanding of free will is impacting on the law.

Gazzaniga was a student of Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel prize for his work on ‘split-brain patients’, people who had the two cortical hemispheres of the brain functional separated by neurosurgery to cut the corpus callosum in an attempt to treat otherwise untreatable epilepsy.

One of the amazing things was that while the people didn’t feel any different, it was easy to demonstrate that the each hemisphere processed things in quite different ways and each was, to a certain extent, independently conscious.

The interview discusses some of this early research, and asks how much of the popular ‘left brain – right brain’ rhetoric that gets thrown around actually stands up to scientific scrutiny. I think you can guess, but it’s good hearing it from the man himself.

Gazzaniga also talks about one of his other interests – neuroethics, and particularly the effect that a neuroscientific understanding of free will is having on our concepts of legal responsibility.

I was interested to read that US judges can now take courses in neuroscience to help them makes sense of the sometimes counter-intuitive findings in cognitive science.

As it happens, Gazzaniga’s new book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique is published today. If you want a taster an Edge article by Gazzaniga from a few months ago seems to be taken from it.

The AITM Blog also has some bonus audio of Gazzaniga discussing his experience of being on George Bush’s bioethics council when the President was vetoing stem cell cloning.

Link to AITM interview with Michael Gazzaniga.

The itch is special

The New Yorker has an excellent article on the neurology of the itch, that curious cutaneous sensation that seems to be handled quite differently from other bodily sensations by the brain.

I warn you, the article is quite icky in places, with a particularly stomach churning case study in one place, but I was quite fascinated to find out that the sensation of the itch seems to rely on itch dedicated nerve cells, distinct from the nerves that transmit pain.

It prompted me to look up some of the literature on the cognitive neuroscience of itch and it turns out there’s quite a healthy number of research studies that are suggesting there may be distinct brain networks for processing itch sensations.

One of the most interesting things is that itch seems to be one of the sensations most sensitive to psychological state. For example, I guarantee you’ll feel more itchy just reading the article (and probably already reading this).

The New Yorker does a great job of relating this work to wider cognitive science discoveries in perception and the neurology of body image, even touching on the fact that people with phantom limbs can feel itches.

Link to New Yorker article ‘The Itch’ (via Frontal Cortex).

Breakdown in the Globe and Mail

All this week, Canada’s Globe and Mail has a fantastic special on mental health entitled Breakdown, relating the personal experiences of people who’ve experienced the extremes of thought and mood, and talking to some of the mental health professionals who work to assist people through times of mental turmoil.

During the coming week, articles on employment and mental health, addiction, mental illness and the law, fighting stigma and the Canadian way of treating mental disorder will be published on a day-by-day basis.

It’s already incredibly comprehensive though, with video interviews, articles and audio slideshows focusing on the life stories of people who’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, as well as an interview with psychiatrist David Goldbloom, one of Canada’s head honchos in mental health.

From what I’ve seen already, and I’m still exploring, it’s a wonderfully put together, powerful and engaging project.

Hats off to The Globe and Mail.

UPDATE: I just watched the interview with psychiatrist David Goldbloom and the last five minutes have a striking reading from an 1841 letter. After hearing the letter, the author might surprise you. Well worth checking out.

Link to Globe and Mail special (via MeFi).

Encephalon 48 makes an entrance

Neuroanthropology has just released the latest edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival, where there’s a line-up of the last fortnight’s best in mind and brain blogging.

A couple of my favourites include an interesting look at the science of out of body experiences, and another on the Amazonian Mundurucu tribe who have no formal maths but who apparently have a logarithmic mapping of numbers onto space.

It’s quite a diverse edition and it seems some of the anthropologically inclined readers of Neuroanthropology have submitted posts as there’s some welcome new faces.

Link to Encephalon 48.

Psychobabble and the expressions we love to hate

PsyBlog has asked readers to nominate the worst examples of psychobabble, to identify verbal crimes against neuroscience, and to nominate where the language of cognitive science is being most used and abused. The best of the worst will be collected and published online, so now’s your chance to name and shame.

There are a few great examples there already and you can either add your contribution to the comments or email Jeremy with your nomination.

My contribution would be the term “hardwired”, which is surely one of the most abused terms in both science journalism and everyday language.

Presumably, it originally meant an innate behaviour or process that is almost entirely genetically determined, or at least, is present from birth without the need for prior experience.

However, it gets used to refer to almost biological finding or reported sex difference.

According to even usually quite reliable sources, we’re “hardwired” for money, risky behaviour, religion, feeling others’ pain, art, fraud, oh, and liking pink, if you’re a girl of course.

Anyway, if you’ve got any misleading jargon that’s been bothering you, do send them on.

Link to PsyBlog’s request for psychobabble.

Suicide, phone masts and magnetic underpants

The Sunday Express is one of the UK’s biggest selling Sunday papers and today’s front page is spectacularly half-cocked, attempting to link suicides to phone masts based on an unpublished study, by a man who sells cranky radiation protection devices, and who seems to have only the feintest grasp of neurobiology.

Roger Coghill (incorrectly described as Dr Coghill in the article), is an independent researcher who argues that radiation from mobile phone masts and electricity cables causes cancer, kills children and, now, is a suicide risk.

The study isn’t published, is not available on his website, and may still turn out to be an interesting well controlled study of mobile phone mast proximity and suicide risk. I’ve requested a copy of the research report, so hopefully I’ll find out, but from the way it is described, I suspect it won’t be.

According to the article, the people who recently killed themselves in a spate of suicides centred around the South Wales town of Bridgend lived closer to a mobile phone mast than the average for each home across the country.

Now, it strikes me that the average distance from a mobile phone mast in any small town is going to be less than the national average because mobile phone masts tend to be clustered around where people live.

So you’d want to do two things. The first, is control for population density, the second is compare the correlation between suicide rate and mobile phone mast distance with other small towns, because you’d want to be sure that this wasn’t a spurious correlation. Neither are mentioned.

According to Mr Coghill, however:

What seems to be happening is that the electrical energy is having an effect on the chemistry of the brain, depleting serotonin levels. We know that in depression serotonin levels are low and that a standard treatment for depression is to give drugs to boost serotonin levels. As they begin to work, the patient’s depression lifts.

So what evidence is there that mobile phone mast radiation affects serotonin levels in the brain? None that I can find. Really, nothing at all. I’d be interested to hear otherwise.

In fact, the whole idea that serotonin, depression and suicide are linked so simply is highly suspect.

Studies that have looked at this association using measures of serotonin metabolites, transporter proteins, receptor density and binding, depletion studies and genetics show remarkably mixed results.

While, on average, there seems to be something up with serotonin neurotransmission in the brains of people diagnosed with depression, the evidence suggests that the ‘low serotonin = depression’ idea is so over-simplified to be virtually useless.

However, those of you who are keen to take precautions even without a good scientific basis may be interested in purchasing some ‘protective devices’ that also lack a good scientific basis.

Mr Coghill’s company also sells lots of useful devices to ‘shield’ you and your pet, and a number of other devices to harness the ‘healing power’ of magnets.

This includes a ‘small discrete unit that attaches to your underwear’ to boost your flagging libido.

This rather obvious conflict of interest is not mentioned in the article.

Anyway, I will await the mystery research report and see whether I need to be avoiding phone masts or putting magnets down my pants.

Link to shining example of how not to do science journalism.

Popcorn reinforcement

Miss Conduct, one of the columnists from The Boston Globe, has picked up on our post about the uncanny resemblance between psychologist Joey Tempest and 80s rock legend Steven Pinker, and noted several other surprising likenesses in the world of cognitive science.

Pictured is the probably-separated-at-birth behaviourist B.F. Skinner and popcorn mogul Orville Redenbacher.

There are several others which raise the question whether celebrities have been routinely disguising themselves as psychologists throughout the years.

Or whether psychologists have been disguising themselves as celebrities. Or wombats, in one case.

Link to Miss Conduct on psychology likenesses.

Female PsyOps soldier dies in Afghanistan

The papers are full of reports about Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first female soldier from the UK forces to die in Aghanistan at the tragically young age of 26. Bryant was serving in Afghanistan as a member of the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, a tri-service PsyOps support service to the British Armed Forces.

The group released a 2007/2008 annual report, and the pdf is available online via the excellent PsyWar website.

One of the key roles of 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group seems to be similar to the US military’s human terrain system, that is, understanding the structure and dynamics of the local society and influencing the people within it.

The bedrock underpinning effective PSYOPS is Target Audience Analysis (TAA) linked to timely intelligence support. TAA involves the systematic study of people in order to enhance our understanding of a military psychological environment. TAA is crucial to the PSYOPS Estimate process and aims to: identify Target Audience attitudes, vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, developing lines of persuasion, key communicators and appropriate symbology and media to exploit a line of persuasion.

In the introduction to the report, the Group Commanding Officer cites ‘Manoeuvrism‘ as one of their key philosophies – an approach that aims to unpredictably strike the enemy at their weak points, rather than use sheer force in pitched battle.

Needless to say, accurate, up-to-date intelligence is essential for this approach and PsyOps has become a key part in this process.

Which is probably why these services seem to have been keen to recruit human scientists during the last few years to try and expand their services.

pdf of 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group 2007/2008 annual report.
Link to PsyWar website.

Rock psychology

The Guardian profiles the life and work of psychologist Steven Pinker, noting both his controversial views on human nature and his “trademark rock-star chic”.

Here at Mind Hacks, we’re glad someone else has finally picked up on Professor Pinker’s rock n’ roll credentials as we’ve noted for some time that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Joey Tempest, lead singer of 80s rock band Europe.

Has anyone ever seen them in the same place? Is there something missing from Pinker’s official biography? I think we should be told.

Link to profile in The Guardian.

2008-06-20 Spike activity

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

Clear thinking science writer Carl Zimmer discusses the evolution of the mind in a video lecture.

Pure Pedantry looks at a new study on serotonin and rejection in the Ultimatum Game.

The increasingly excellent Frontier Psychiatrist has a good post on neurosyphilis.

The New York Times has a brief piece on the neuroscience of schizophrenia with funky animation and auditory commentary.

Developmental language disorder is the subject of a Health Report special.

The Chicago Reader interviews the author of ‘Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness’ (thanks Melissa!).

Neurophilosophy examines new research on the neuropsychology of confabulations.

Senior moments and the ageing brain are discussed on NPR Radio.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers some fascinating research on the facial expression of fear and the experimental creation of ‘anti-faces’.

Illusion Sciences is a great blog about the science of visual illusions.

Popular herbal supplement Ginkgo ‘does not treat dementia’, according to BBC News.

Research on porn and mirror neurons involves a sloppy reverse inference. Sadly, not as sexy as it sounds.

Furious Seasons on the fact that GlaxoSmithKline are being investigated for allegedly falsifying data on paroxetine and suicide.

People who are sexually attracted to walls, computers and a range of other inanimate objects are featured in an article in Bizarre magazine.

New Scientist suggest that self-obsessed, manipulative and deceitful men have the most sex… oh hang on, it should be ‘report having the most sex’. I knew there was a flaw in there somewhere.

Some excellent local news reporting on the brain imaging research of Nottingham neuroscientist Richard Ramsey.

Film content, editing, and directing style affect brain activity. As does popcorn I presume.

The Telegraph looks at the science of why we scream.

Political philosophers seem to vote less often than other philosophers, according to Eric Schwitzgebel’s fantastic ongoing project to examine the utility of philosophy.

Discover Magazine has a great short video on research showing that ADHD may be delayed brain maturation that eventually catches up.

The endowment effect and the psychological influence of property is discusses by The Economist.

The Atlantic publishes two pages of absolute drivel about brain scans and FKF Research (who else?). Slate takes them to task for publishing such nonsense.

Rabble rousing psychologist Richard Lynn cites IQ – atheism correlation as causal in the Times Higher Ed.

Reality at the far reaches of the world

Anthropologist and explorer Wade Davis gave a couple of inspiring talks to the TED conference on how the beliefs and traditions of different cultures fundamentally alter not only views about the world, but the experience of reality itself.

Both are fantastic, not only because Davis is a gripping speaker, but also because he highlights the sheer beauty and diversity of the world’s peoples and cultural practices – from Voodoo rituals in Haiti to the Inuit of Northern Canada.

The first explores cultures in some of the world’s harder to reach areas, while the second focuses on the diversity of belief and ritual across the planet.

Davis is perhaps best known for his early work on Voodoo, the process of zombification, and his discovery that the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin may be an essential part of the process.

This work was published in the scientific literature, but also in two well-known books, The Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness.

Administration of tetrodotoxin is unlikely to be the sole explanation for zombification, however.

A 1997 paper in the medical journal Lancet reported on three cases, where what Western medicine would call mental illness and neurological impairment seemed to be present in three cases of people labelled zombies by locals in Haiti.

Anthropology is perhaps one of the smallest schools of human study, but, I think, one of the most important. It constantly reminds us that our way of seeing the world is firmly located in the culture that we live in, and that everything we understand is filtered through our own perspective.

Link to video of ‘Cultures at the far edge of the world’.
Link to video of ‘The worldwide web of belief and ritual’.
pdf of ‘Clinical findings in three cases of zombification’.