The neuropundits are more like tarot readers than scientists: They claim to read specific mental states from patterns of blood flow and brain activity, but the narratives they invent are arbitrary, equivocal, and inconsistent. And whenever the imaging data happen to contradict reality, they change their interpretation without a second thought.Indeed. Another example of cognitive neuroscience gone badly awry...
Showing posts with label Cognitive Neuroscience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cognitive Neuroscience. Show all posts
Monday, June 23, 2008
This is your brain on nonsense
Remember that idiotic NYT editorial from November last year that claimed fMRI scans of swing voters' brains could be used to read their minds? Well, the same company that pulled off that stunt is back with an equally egregious piece in The Atlantic. Slate's suitably skeptical,
Friday, March 14, 2008
Video: Jill Bolte Taylor at TED
Jill Bolte Taylor, an Indiana University School of Medicine neuroanatomist, gave a fascinating talk at TED in February. (The video is embedded below, here is the direct link). While I certainly think the video is worth watching (otherwise I wouldn't feature it here), I have a couple of serious reservations. It's clear from the video that Taylor's experience was an intensely emotional one and, let's be frank, science and intense emotions don't go so well together. It certainly made me worry when she started going on about "nirvana", it annoyed me that she dramatically oversimplified the very nuanced, complicated and still emerging picture of hemispherical specialization in the brain, and it frustrated me generally that she seems to let her emotions get in the way of her science. (To be clear: emotions are important and I have no problem with them being expressed, even at TED. But we should try our best not to let our emotions influence our intellectual positions - that's what I'm criticizing Taylor for, not the sheer fact of being emotional).
See also: Wired's article on Taylor's TEDTalk.
See also: Wired's article on Taylor's TEDTalk.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
ESP vs. fMRI
Two Harvard psychologists, Samuel Moulton and John Lindsley, have a study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience which provides yet more evidence against extra-sensory perception. Moulton and Lindsley reasoned that if psi exists it must occur in the brain and thus neuroimaging should be able to detect it. Using several modalities aimed at detecting the existence of different psi abilities (clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition) the authors conclude that, since "the brains of our participants... reacted to psi and non-psi stimuli in a statistically indistinguishable manner", the study provides "the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena".
This probably goes without saying, but I sincerely doubt any true believers will be convinced by this evidence. The contentious issue will no doubt be whether psi abilities would have to be a product of the brain - cue dualist nonsense.
(See also: ScienceDaily's report, Deric Bownds's Mindblog and Scienceblog).
This probably goes without saying, but I sincerely doubt any true believers will be convinced by this evidence. The contentious issue will no doubt be whether psi abilities would have to be a product of the brain - cue dualist nonsense.
(See also: ScienceDaily's report, Deric Bownds's Mindblog and Scienceblog).
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Your brain on politics: the bad and the better
The bad
Amodio et. al. conducted this test by using an electroencephalogram to record the ACC activity in 43 subjects who were asked to complete a go/no-go association task (Nosek & Banaji, 2001). For the task, participants were placed in a sound-proof room, in front of a computer screen in the center of which either an "M" or a "W" appeared. Half the subjects were instructed to "go" (i.e. hit a key) when they saw an "M" and do nothing ("no-go") when they saw a "W", while the other half were asked to do the opposite. The task consisted of 500 trails, 80% of which consisted of the "go" stimulus and 20% of the "no-go" stimulus. This meant that for half the subjects "M" became a habitual response (which needed to be inhibited when they saw a "W") and for the other half "W" became habitual (which needed to be inhibited when they saw an "M"). Additionally, before the task was administered, subjects reported their political attitudes confidentially on a scale ranging from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative).
The results were very suggestive. Firstly, however, it is important to note that there are in fact two types of finding in this study: the behavioral findings (which the authors do not focus on) and the cognitive neuroscience findings (which the authors emphasized and most of the subsequent discussion revolved around). The behavioral finding - which is interesting all by itself - is that liberals were more accurate than conservatives on the no-go trails (r(41) = 0.30, P less than 0.05) which "suggests that a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change".
The neurocognitive findings were (among other things) that the response-locked error-related negativity (ERN) - a measure of conflict between a habitual tendency and an alternative - was strongly correlated (r(41) = 0.59, P less than 0.001) with political attitudes:
Additionally, liberalism was strongly associated with greater conflict-related neural activity when a habitual response had to be inhibited:
Subsequently, localization analysis was performed, which confirmed that the above mentioned ERN activity originated from the ACC. Amodio et. al. conclude that "taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanisms related to cognitive control and self regulation".
A couple of observations. The study is clearly preliminary and a good deal of the reporting of it in the lay press went far beyond the evidence. The authors, however, obviously cannot be blamed for this - they were careful not to stray from the evidence in their paper. Furthermore, only 43 subjects took part in the study and, worse, only 7 of those self-reported as conservative. The findings would have to be replicated by a different team in a different part in the US with a larger number of participants before too much stock can be placed in them. For now this can be filed under "interesting and suggestive but preliminary". We'll have to wait and see how the literature develops.
Links
A disturbingly bad article, entitled "This is Your Brain on Politics", appeared recently in the New York Times. It presented purported "research" about the brains of swing voters in the 2008 US Presidential Elections but, unfortunately, the article does little but illustrate the dangers of circumventing the peer-review process and the shocking state of science journalism in the mainstream media. Luckily, the NYT published an angry letter by a group of cognitive neuroscientists condemning the article and the blogosphere responded forcefully, among the blogs that attacked the piece were: Bad Science, Neurocritic, Mindhacks, Brainethics and Natural Rationality. Subsequently, Nature published an editorial also condemning the article and even Slate joined in.
The better
Thankfully there has also been some better recent research concerning 'the brain on politics' and good media coverage thereof to boot. The subject of last week's edition of ABC Radio National's fantastic radio show/podcast, All in the Mind, was "The Political Brain" and the show discussed, among other things, an interesting study in Nature Neuroscience entitled "Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism" (see also the supplementary materials). The study, led by NYU assistant professor of psychology David Amodio, evoked considerable interest and was widely discussed by the science blogging community. (See links below). I suspect the study has been somewhat misunderstood, so, despite it being stale by web standards, I'll look at it in some detail.
The hypothesis the authors defend is that political orientation (conservative vs. liberal) is "associated with individual differences in a basic neurocognitive mechanism involved broadly in self-regulation" (Amodio et. al., 2007: 1246). They go about testing this proposition in a somewhat tortuous way: previous research had shown that conservatives are "more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision-making" whereas liberals "report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences". Other research showed that psychological differences between liberals and conservatives "map onto the... self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring" (the system that detects a mismatch between habitual responses and the response required in the current situation) which in turn has been "associated with neurocognitive activity in the anterior cingulate cortext"(ACC). So, to test whether liberals and conservatives differ in their patterns of self-regulation, the authors measured the acitivity of the ACC in a situation requiring conflict-monitoring.
The better
Thankfully there has also been some better recent research concerning 'the brain on politics' and good media coverage thereof to boot. The subject of last week's edition of ABC Radio National's fantastic radio show/podcast, All in the Mind, was "The Political Brain" and the show discussed, among other things, an interesting study in Nature Neuroscience entitled "Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism" (see also the supplementary materials). The study, led by NYU assistant professor of psychology David Amodio, evoked considerable interest and was widely discussed by the science blogging community. (See links below). I suspect the study has been somewhat misunderstood, so, despite it being stale by web standards, I'll look at it in some detail.The hypothesis the authors defend is that political orientation (conservative vs. liberal) is "associated with individual differences in a basic neurocognitive mechanism involved broadly in self-regulation" (Amodio et. al., 2007: 1246). They go about testing this proposition in a somewhat tortuous way: previous research had shown that conservatives are "more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision-making" whereas liberals "report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences". Other research showed that psychological differences between liberals and conservatives "map onto the... self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring" (the system that detects a mismatch between habitual responses and the response required in the current situation) which in turn has been "associated with neurocognitive activity in the anterior cingulate cortext"(ACC). So, to test whether liberals and conservatives differ in their patterns of self-regulation, the authors measured the acitivity of the ACC in a situation requiring conflict-monitoring.
Amodio et. al. conducted this test by using an electroencephalogram to record the ACC activity in 43 subjects who were asked to complete a go/no-go association task (Nosek & Banaji, 2001). For the task, participants were placed in a sound-proof room, in front of a computer screen in the center of which either an "M" or a "W" appeared. Half the subjects were instructed to "go" (i.e. hit a key) when they saw an "M" and do nothing ("no-go") when they saw a "W", while the other half were asked to do the opposite. The task consisted of 500 trails, 80% of which consisted of the "go" stimulus and 20% of the "no-go" stimulus. This meant that for half the subjects "M" became a habitual response (which needed to be inhibited when they saw a "W") and for the other half "W" became habitual (which needed to be inhibited when they saw an "M"). Additionally, before the task was administered, subjects reported their political attitudes confidentially on a scale ranging from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative).
The results were very suggestive. Firstly, however, it is important to note that there are in fact two types of finding in this study: the behavioral findings (which the authors do not focus on) and the cognitive neuroscience findings (which the authors emphasized and most of the subsequent discussion revolved around). The behavioral finding - which is interesting all by itself - is that liberals were more accurate than conservatives on the no-go trails (r(41) = 0.30, P less than 0.05) which "suggests that a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change".
The neurocognitive findings were (among other things) that the response-locked error-related negativity (ERN) - a measure of conflict between a habitual tendency and an alternative - was strongly correlated (r(41) = 0.59, P less than 0.001) with political attitudes:
Additionally, liberalism was strongly associated with greater conflict-related neural activity when a habitual response had to be inhibited:
Subsequently, localization analysis was performed, which confirmed that the above mentioned ERN activity originated from the ACC. Amodio et. al. conclude that "taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanisms related to cognitive control and self regulation".A couple of observations. The study is clearly preliminary and a good deal of the reporting of it in the lay press went far beyond the evidence. The authors, however, obviously cannot be blamed for this - they were careful not to stray from the evidence in their paper. Furthermore, only 43 subjects took part in the study and, worse, only 7 of those self-reported as conservative. The findings would have to be replicated by a different team in a different part in the US with a larger number of participants before too much stock can be placed in them. For now this can be filed under "interesting and suggestive but preliminary". We'll have to wait and see how the literature develops.
Links
- Coverage of the Amodio paper on other blogs: NeuroLogica, Cognitive Daily, Natural Rationality, Crooked Timber, Mixing Memory, and Neurocritic.
- News coverage: Scientific American.
Bibliography
Amodio, D.A., Jost, J.T., Master, S.L., Yee, C.M. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 1246-1247. DOI: 10.1038/nn1979
Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2001) "The go/no-go association task," Social Cognition, 19(6): 161-176.
Amodio, D.A., Jost, J.T., Master, S.L., Yee, C.M. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 1246-1247. DOI: 10.1038/nn1979
Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2001) "The go/no-go association task," Social Cognition, 19(6): 161-176.
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