Neuroscience: Separating the wheat from the laugh

In an article that attempts to separate the wheat from the laugh (oops, that should be "chaff", right?), Elizabeth Landau, at Neuromill, rags the endlessly diverting pop neuroscience of our time.

Men, they tell us, treat bikini-clad women as "objects." You mean, objects like soup tureens and smoke detectors?

NO. It turns out that they means "sex objects" - something to have non-personal sex with. Well ... oh my stars, what a revelation ... who would ever have imagined!

She writes,

Thankfully a bad neurojournalism spotter gearing up for Mardi Gras was alert! We didn't catch the talk inspiring CNN at AAAS (the neurocurmudgeons were too busy being scared witless by the climate scientists) but we hope the original source is less muddled than the news story. We start with "women as objects" and then morph into "sexy women as goals" and then something about "action." Look, don't get us wrong -- we don't like the idea of humans being objectified for any reason in any context. But neither can we defend shoddy science just because we might have warm and fuzzy feelings for the findings.

Now in that last sentence, Landau captures the problem beautifully. Too many people will welcome the findings if they support what they already believe, without asking the obvious question: How did these people arrive at this view? Through any reasonable process of dissecting evidence?

And by the way, Neuromill is definitely a site to watch. This is from its About Us:

Welcome to the Neurojournalism Mill! The site dedicated to sifting the wheat from the chaff of popular media reporting on news about the brain. Regular readers of Bad Neurojournalism will find our usual bad-tempered neurocurmudgeonly musings, including the BNJ archives, in Chaff.

In Wheat, the neurocurmudgeons will grudgingly acknowledge (only kidding, we are delighted when we have the opportunity to say something positive) articles and newstories that make a superior effor to "get it right". By "getting it right" we do not mean just getting the basic facts correct - we mean covering brain science with a high degree of integrity, sensitivity, and sophistication so that the reader is genuinely informed.

To be considered Chaff, the article must demonstrate one (or more than one) of the
following flaws:

- seriously misrepresents the original science
- covers research of dubious value
- wildly extrapolates the reported findings
- presents an overly simplistic interpretation of a complex finding

So, just imagine, even more people are noticing the nonsense and commenting now.

Hey, did I die and somehow go to heaven - no?

Okay, so it's not quite that good: Maybe I can someday retire, and write thrillers, because not all the young people are dumb after all.

New book watch: Newberg and Waldman's How God Changes Your Brain

This from a Washington Post review by Wray Herbert (March 29, 2009) of Andrew Newberg and Robert Mark Waldman's new book, How God Changes Your Brain:

Newberg, a neuroscientist and memory expert, has a special interest in spirituality; he has scanned the brains of worshipers ranging from Franciscan nuns to Pentecostals speaking in tongues. So why was he bothering with Gus?

Well, Newberg explains in "How God Changes Your Brain," his studies (with coauthor Mark Robert Waldman) had convinced him of a link between spirituality and cognitive health: The neurochemical changes that he observed during meditation and prayer appeared to improve brain function. But Newberg had studied mostly devotees with years of spiritual training; he wanted to see whether a novice might benefit, too. Newberg, a neuroscientist and memory expert, has a special interest in spirituality; he has scanned the brains of worshipers ranging from Franciscan nuns to Pentecostals speaking in tongues. So why was he bothering with Gus? Well, Newberg explains in "How God Changes Your Brain," his studies (with coauthor Mark Robert Waldman) had convinced him of a link between spirituality and cognitive health: The neurochemical changes that he observed during meditation and prayer appeared to improve brain function. But Newberg had studied mostly devotees with years of spiritual training; he wanted to see whether a novice might benefit, too.

Gus, a Philadelphia mechanic, experienced failing memory, and sought help ... .

He got help, via Hindu spirituality. I am glad. However, I wonder whether failing memory is primarily a spiritual problem.



I suspect that any set of intellectual exercises - consistently pursued - will help many patients. But we shall see. It's a young field yet.

Psychology: New "syndrome" called "Academic Entitlement"

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editor Paul Greenberg writes about a supposed new disorder:

... a team of academics has written a paper about this sad trend. ("Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting and Motivational Factors"). The syndrome now has a name (Academic Entitlement) and an abbreviation (AE) — just like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Doubtless there will soon be federal grants and endowed chairs to study AE and a drug to treat it. And sure enough, it'll turn out to be more widespread than anyone ever suspected.

The four scholars who did this Pioneering Study trace the origins of AE to parental pressure, material rewards for good grades, competitiveness, and "achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation." They conclude that AE is "most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of entitlement and to narcissism."

Curiously, I finally got a chance to write about this today and - what do you know? - it's front page news here in in Ontario (a province of Canada) as well (Toronto Star, April 6, 2009):

James Côté, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, says the survey confirms a lot of recent research, and that the decline in student preparedness began years ago but has more recently accelerated.

"It's a wider societal issue, where leisure is very much valued and work habits are not necessarily reinforced in the way that they were in the past. The work ethic is not what it used to be ... no pain, no gain doesn't seem to be prevalent any more."

Côté co-authored a book, Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, that in part chronicled the issues professors have with today's students and he writes a blog where he hears from professors all the time.

With the current focus on stemming high-school dropouts, discipline and punctuality are not longer reinforced, and students come to university expecting to continue that, he added.

I've always regarded the claim that self-esteem (and the resulting sense of entitlement) were strong motivators for achievement as just another form of false knowledge (the things we "know" that ain't so). When I was young, I often saw girls who got 99% on a test beating themselves up emotionally for a single mistake, and boys who flaunted their drastically low scores in contempt for the system. (Some of those boys would be in jail not many years later, but there was no question who had the higher self-esteem They did.)

There are as many ways of explaining that situation as there are schools of psychology, but the idea that self-esteem is closely related to achievement has not turned out to be one of the good ones.

Religion: From the okay, okay, some religions ARE just plain bad files ...

Get a load of this. If it doesn't creep you out, seek help. Soon. Now.

Identical twins: Identical genes does not mean identical minds

Jonah Leher, at Frontal Cortex, briefly profiles identical twins who are poets with vastly different styles:

... the Dickman twins, who were raised together and have been close their entire lives, seem to offer a parallel experiment. One way of looking at their work - Michael's Dickinsonian severity, and Matthew's Whitmanesque expansiveness - is as an illustration of the distinctiveness of imagination, even in two people who are as alike as two people can be.

Yes indeed.

I wish some authors (no reference to Lehrer) would get over the idea that we should expect identical twins to have similar personalities. For one thing, one usually becomes the dominant twin and the other the recessive one. That changes personality dramatically, and I imagine that writing style might differ as a result.

Another possible influence on personality is whether twins are socially rewarded for acting similar (even when they don't feel similar). When I was a child in the 1950s, some parents liked to dress identical twins identically. They thought that was really cute. Wiser heads condemned the practice, of course, and - from what I can see - it has lost cultural favour, at least in my part of Toronto.

Also, in some schools, identical twins might be assigned to different classrooms rather than side by side - on the grounds that language and social skills develop faster. In that case, the twins could be experiencing very different early environments as well. (That was done when I was a child, perhaps as a reaction to the parents who thought that dressing identicals exactly alike was really cute.)

See also: Intelligence: How much is heredity and how much is environment?

Once again: How much brain do you need?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose