Neuro-nonsense: A guide to spotting examples

At Oscillatory Thoughts, Bradley Voytek cautions against the pop science media’s simplifications of brain activity on subjects like curiosity :

How to be a neuroscientist

Written by Bradley Voytek at 12:54
In this post, I will teach you all how to be proper, skeptical neuroscientists. By the end of this post, not only will you be able to spot "neuro nonsense" statements, but you'll also be able to spot nonsense neuroscience questions.

I implore my journalist friends to take note of what I say in this post.

Much has already been said on the topic of modern neuroimaging masquerading as "new phrenology". A lot of these arguments and conversations are hidden from the lay public, however, so I'm going to expose the dirty neuroscientific underbelly here.

Curiosity?

Well, what is it? Is it even remotely likely that one small area of the brain will govern everything from “Why does she act like she knows something I don’t” over to “Why do geese fly in a V”, and as far down as “Why do people vote for Jane Schtickle, whom I can’t stand”?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Neuroscience: Journal explores relationship between neuroscience and quantum physics

This journal, NeuroQuantology, must be a sign of the times. It relates neuroscience to quantum mechanics. It has a better than average chance, in that case, of not being mere neurobullshipping*, but actually starting to answer questions about the relation between the mind and the brain:

Vol 7, No 1 (2009)
Time, Timing, and the Brain

Dear Readers,

NeuroQuantology has just published its latest special issue (Time,
Timing, and the Brain) issue at

http://www.neuroquantology.com/journal/index.php/nq/issue/current.

We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.

In additon to NeuroQuantology journal, We have eprints and multimedia archive. arNQ Eprints is the NeuroQuantology's digital repository. You can submit unpublished/published articles (pdf, ps, tex, doc), lecture, conference and meeting video-sound records, news and web site URL via electronically.

You can visit arNQ Eprints and Multimedia

http://www.neuroquantology.com/repository/

*Examples begin with this story because it is a post label. Scroll down.

Neuroscience and popular culture: Who do voodoo? They do! Social neuroscientists, that is

Hey, you've heard it all from the fashion mag at the local clip shop, ... so, like, what can I add, really?

Neuroscience shows why women love shopping, why gay guys read maps like women, why jealous guys ... come to think of it, why does social neuroscience only tell us what we already heard from that high school drop-out cousin, shooting pool down in the rec room between his split shifts at the loading dock?

Is this really science? Probably not, say a team of statisticians, who took a look at some of these studies. Basically, many of the claimed correlations were simply too high to be possible. That was because the "social neuroscience" people were cherry picking the data.

Here's the paper, "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience," in press at Perspectives on Psychological Science. The lead author Edward Vul is one brave MIT grad student, along with Christine Harris, Pietr Winkelman, and Harold Pashler.

Taking aim at social neuroscience, they said,

The newly emerging field of Social Neuroscience has drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and measures of brain activation obtained using fMRI. We show that these correlations often exceed what is statistically possible assuming the (evidently rather limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality/emotion measures. The implausibly high correlations are all the more puzzling because social-neuroscience method sections rarely contain sufficient detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained.

We surveyed authors of 54 articles that reported findings of this kind to determine the details of their analyses. More than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for individual voxels, and reports means of just the subset of voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. We show how this non-independent analysis grossly inflates correlations, while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample. In addition, we argue that other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious correlations in some cases.

We outline how the data from these studies could be reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide the field with accurate estimates of the correlations in question. We urge authors to perform such reanalyses and to correct the scientific record.

Vuh's team suggests specific statistical means of rescuing the questionable "red list" studies' findings, if the authors wish to perform them.

The authors of the "red list" (= highly questionable) studies have responded, denouncing the voodoo claim.

Very well, but here are some good reasons for taking "social neuroscience" with a really huge bag of sidewalk salt (not hard to find here in Toronto these days, due to a recent cold snap, and pictured above):

1. Brain studies should usually be somewhat imprecise because everyone's brain is different. Perhaps only a few situations will genuinely produce a high, predictable finding (extreme pain?). That isn't a criticism of the field; quite the contrary, recognition of inevitable limitations is a hallmark of good science. As Vuh's team puts it,

Although it is possible for voxels registered to the ‘average brain’ to be functionally matched across subjects, the variability in anatomical location of well-studied regions even in early visual cortex (V1, MT) and visual cognition (FFA) suggests to us that higher-level functions determining individual differences in personality and emotionality is not likely to be anatomically uniform across individuals (Saxe, Brett, & Kanwisher, 2006).

2. The correlations really were just too good to be true. Cashing a winning lottery ticket is one thing. Cashing a number of them could lead to suspicion (and in one case I know of, criminal accusations).

3. Suspiciously, social neuroscience tells us what we already believe to be true, and puts a "science" spin on it. As Sharon Begley points out, quoting mutuallyoccluded, the skewered studies “vindicate the crudest of stereotypes." Real science, by contrast, often challenges popular ideas and forces us to think harder than we normally would.

4. Pop culture theories or prejudices must be distinguished from common sense inferences. Pop culture theories are typically based on pop psychology fads. Common sense, by contrast, is based on millennia of observation. Suppose, for example, someone claimed to "prove" through social neuroscience that most crack addicts are healthy and happy. Well, the parade of misery through emergency rooms, court rooms, jails, and police morgues would certainly suggest otherwise! It's not prejudice that makes us doubt that finding, but rather the weight of contrary evidence from other sources. Common sense tells us to believe the weight of the evidence, not some novel finding.

5. The papers Vuh's team has trashed were published in prestigious journals. That suggests that science, in this area, is in a rut. The most likely reason is that the scientists are seeking a certainty that just isn't there. And it is never going to be there. We live in a universe where indeterminacy is built in, and that won't change.

Social neuroscience, in my view, is just the latest instance of - in Bruce Thornton's phrase - "the things we know that ain't so."

Some other resources:

In "The 'Voodoo' Science of Brain Imaging," (Newsweek blog, January 09, 2009) Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain offers well-justified skepticism of the transparent pop science agenda. She thinks it's physics envy. A desire for precision in a field that studies the restless sea of the brain. Could be. How much easier to deal with predictable particles than constantly shifting brains!

British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog, Do you do voodoo?

By analogy with a purely behavioural experiment, imagine the author of a new psychometric measure claiming that his new test correlated with a target psychological construct, when actually he had arrived at his significant correlation only after he had first identified and analysed just those items that showed the correlation with the target construct. Indeed, Pashler and his collaborators speculated that the editors and reviewers of mainstream psychology journals would routinely pick up on the kind of flaws seen in imaging-based social neuroscience, but that the novelty and complexity of this new field meant such mistakes have slipped through the net.

Here's Neurocritic's view ("Deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology")

Neuroscience and literary criticism - grantsmanship minus achievement

Raymond Tallis destroys the "neuro-lit-crit" delusion here:

A generation of academic literary critics has now arisen who invoke “neuroscience” to assist them in their work of explication, interpretation and appreciation. Norman Bryson, once a leading exponent of Theory and a social constructivist, has described his Damascene conversion, as a result of which he now places the firing of neurons rather than signifiers at the heart of literary criticism. Evolutionary theory, sociobiology and allied forces are also recruited to the cause, since, we are reminded, the brain functions as it does to support survival. The dominant model of brain function among cognitive neuroscientists is that of a computer, and so computational theory is sometimes thrown into the mix. The kinds of things critics get up to these days are illustrated by a recent volume, Evolutionary and Neurocognitive Approaches to Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, edited by Colin Martindale and others (New York, 2007), with chapter headings such as “Literary Creativity: A Neuropsychoanalytic View”, and a call for papers for a congress this year on “Cognitive Approaches to Medieval Texts” (cognitive science, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology all welcome); and the emergence of “Darwinian literary criticism” which approaches the Iliad and Madame Bovary through the lens of theories about the evolved brain. Evolutionary explanations of why people create and enjoy literature, “neurocognitive frameworks” for aesthetics, and neural-network explanations for the perception of beauty are all linked through the notion that our experiences of art are the experiences of a brain developed to support survival. - Neuroaesthetics is wrong about our experience of literature – and it is wrong about humanity.

No doubt about that.

... neuroscience groupies reduce the reading and writing of literature to brain events that are common to every action in ordinary human life, and, in some cases, in ordinary non-human animal life. For this reason – and also because it is wrong about literature, overstates the understanding that comes from neuroscience and represents a grotesquely reductionist attitude to humanity – neuroaesthetics must be challenged. (Times Literary Supplement, April 9, 2008)

People come to writing and reading in a vast variety of mental states. Obviously, those mental states usually correlate to neural states - but so? So, one more for the neurobullshipping files.

See also:

Coffee break: Why does this "neuroscience boot camp" make me nervous?

Neurotheology: Bad neurology and bad theology?

Neuroscience: Let the machine read your mind ... we offer an installment plan!

Culture: Neuro this and neuro that and neuro go away!

Coffee break: Why does this "neuroscience boot camp" make me nervous?

Here's why:

“Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role.”

“The only prerequisites are a grasp of basic statistics and at least a dim recollection of high school biology and physics.”

As it happens, someone whose "thing" definitely isn't science phoned me today about this very conference. Of course he had heard about it. Trust me, he hears about everything.

Potential participants are asked to provide a 200-word statement explaining their interest. And he wanted me to let him know if there were any spelling or grammar mistakes in his application, which I reproduce here (for your convenience, I have corrected numerous mistakes and made certain other discreet alterations):

Hi, as you know, I am a used car salesman.

I am stuck with a huge heap of gas guzzlers in an economy where everyone is watching their budget and more people than ever work at home and order goods via the Internet.

So their cars don’t wear out so fast.

My [profanity deleted] industry is in the toilet, and I don’t know if the [profanity deleted] government will fork over the money to keep it [profanity deleted] going!

I have issues with the people who say I am sleazy, and am currently suing eighteen of these liars.

Look, I WON my last case at the local automotive arbitration panel ...

It felt so good finally winning a case!

Is this 200 words? I guess I better come to the point, right?

I want to advance a really critical new field: neurobullshipping

Hey, if I make this work, I’ll cut you all in.

Why not? I will be as rich as stink.

Eddie “the lube job” Sloan

Well, Eddie, it's a bit shy of 200 words, but I really do think you have made your point, so it's best not to go on gilding the lily ...

See also:

Neurotheology: Bad neurology and bad theology?

Neuroscience: Let the machine read your mind ... we offer an installment plan!

Culture: Neuro this and neuro that and neuro go away!

All the junk that's fit to debunk: "Neuropolitics" is up next

(Note: This was my ChristianWeek column, published in print as "Neuroscience hits the junk science circuit" November 15, 2008.)

Methods of probing the brain at work - while communicating with the research volunteer - have made neuroscience a very cool toy indeed. Functional magnetic resonance imaging has done for brain studies what the diving bell did for ocean studies. But all good science risks attracting junk science. And today I am going to talk about a junk science - neuropolitics.

With any luck, by the time this column sees print, we will no longer be hearing much from politicians for a while. But, knowing a timely fad when they see one, enterprising groups of researchers in psychology and neuroscience have been dabbling in “neuropolitics” — with predictable results.

In “Political Science: What Being Neat or Messy Says about Political Leanings” (Scientific American, October 13, 2008) Jordan Lite skeptically chronicles neuroscience-based explanations for voting behavior. Here’s an attempted explanation of a surge of sympathy for the Republican VP candidate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, after she was announced:

Circuits of cells called mirror neurons that fire or send out signals when we see someone act in a way that's familiar may have played a role in a 20-point, post–Republican Convention swing in allegiances among white, female Obama supporters to the GOP ticket, says Marco Iacoboni, author of the book Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect with Others. Pundits credited John McCain's pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate for the shift, but Iacoboni says there's reason to believe biology played a role.

At the most basic level, mirror neurons—in the form of empathy with Palin—may have temporarily dazzled swing female voters, says neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, author of the 2006 book The Female Brain, which explores hormonal and other influences on the brains of women and girls.

"The mirror neurons in your brain are going, 'ding, ding, ding—this person is just like me,'" Brizendine says. Those mirror neurons are working with the insula, a section of the limbic system involved with emotions and gut feelings, she says. Both operate at a subcortical, or nonthinking, level dubbed the "sub-Blink level" after New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling 2005 book Blink about gut instincts.

These comments handily illustrate a common factor in junk neuroscience: The attempt to find occult explanations for behavior. By “occult” explanations, I mean explanations that are not needed if we assume that the voter is behaving consciously and (in her own terms) rationally.

The text of the proposed explanations addresses mechanisms in the brain, but the subtext is that no one could conclude on rational grounds that sitting governor Palin might make a better vice president than career senator Biden. So we are asked to consider neurons or hormones or the “nonthinking” “sub-Blink” level as an explanation instead.

Lite quotes neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps’ caution that “neuropolitics” is “too nascent” a discipline to justify such strong conclusions. Actually, neuropolitics is a bogus discipline whose purpose is to use the trappings of neuroscience to flag the generally liberal political beliefs of academics as more scientific than those of the average voter. Such studies are an excellent demonstration of confirmation bias — seeing only the evidence that supports what we already believe.

As it happens, much sound research has been done on how people decide who to vote for. Briefly, many voters do not think much about politics, but vote for a candidate who sounds “reasonable” — generally, the one they hear the most positive news about. Some always vote for or against the incumbent. Others are canvassed at the workplace to vote for, say, the “pro-union” party or the “pro-industry” party. In some regions, the region-friendly party routinely wins. Religious figures often suggest a direction for the vote of the faithful. Some voters, having paid little attention to the issues or party policy, “do their duty” by voting for an ethnically reassuring name or photo. Some factors are harder to predict. There is the disputed Bradley effect, for example — voters may reassure pollsters that they intend to vote for a minority group member, when they will in fact vote for reasons listed above.

The neuroscience around how we make choices is a fascinating study, and I certainly don’t want to discourage it. But serious study must begin by addressing the large existing fact base of rational and conscious factors that sway voters, not by proposing exotic theories about irrational and unconscious factors, theories that merely flatter the vanity of professors.

Denyse O'Leary is the co-author of The Spiritual Brain (Harper One, 2007)

"Neurotheology": Bad neurology and bad theology?

In "God, theologian and humble neurologist", Alasdair Coles of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge reviews recent books, Did my neurons make me do it? and The Soul in the Brain for Brain (June 23, 2008). He and I share a dislike of "neurotheology," which he describes as "bad neurology and bad theology" (and which I have described less elegantly as "neurobullshipping"):

In the 1980s, a small group of neuroscientists arrogated for itself a new field of ‘neurotheology’ which has become—not to put too fine a point on it—an embarrassment. In privatized discussions, over-interpreted accounts of poor experiments are recycled to construct grand schemes to explain religious experience.

Yuh. Mario and I discussed a number of these schemes in The Spiritual Brain, and they all have one thing in common: They aim to explain religious experiences away rather than explain them.

It is as if someone were to explain Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in terms of infighting at the Vatican. If infighting at the Vatican in those days explained the Sistine, no one would bother with it now.

Coles also talks about another favourite subject - the apparently sudden emergence of human consciousness, especially as expressed in art, literature, music, and spirituality:

The Upper Paleolithic Revolution consisted of more than just cave paintings. Visual creativity emerged in many other ways. Burial rites become more complex. And, it is speculated, the first music was made and the first words spoken. van Huyssteen argues that the key distinction between Upper Paleolithic man and homo sapiens elsewhere and earlier hominids, was the power to construct and understand symbol, of which language of course is a part. This ability to ‘code the invisible’ allowed for storage of information outside of the gene and the start of the cultural
non-genetic inheritance. The ‘mental toolkit’ required to manage symbolic representation is the ‘ability to be conscious of being conscious’ and to search for meaning. The new humans wake up, discover they are naked and meet God.

[ ... ]

So it seems that, some 30–40 000 years ago in Europe, humans suddenly acquired the gifts of self-awareness, symbol, language and creativity. Which of these was the foundational event is hard to know, and perhaps need not be known. But, importantly, spirituality was part of the package.

Yes, and that spirituality seems so evident in the cave paintings! The pantings are not about animals literally, in the sense that an anatomical diagram or textbook description might be about animals. The cave paintings are about the artists' perceptions of animals, their relationship to animals, and their explorations of what it must feel like to be an animal.

Tour the caves, courtesy France's culture ministry. Also tour the Lascaux caves here (at Virtual visit) and view Altamira cave images here.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose.

Neuroscience: Let the machine read your mind! (We offer an installment plan ... )

Stephanie West Allen over at friendly blog Brains on Purpose draws my attention to this example of neurobullshipping (ridiculous claims for neuroscience's ability to "read minds"):

In recent years, the development of new brain-imaging technologies has prompted many physicians and neurologists to forsake the rather dreary study of nerve cells in favor of a far more glamorous arena: feelings, thoughts and political attitudes. Some of them assure us that with the advanced instruments, we will be able to understand what goes through people's head, read dreams as though they were a written text, and decide questions of guilt and innocence in a court of law.

The article quoted, "Of Two Minds" by Ofri Ilani and Yotam Feldman in Haaretz Magazine is an excellent read, which offers the suggestion that at least some of the neurobullshipping is generated by people who sell the machines used in neuroscience:

Prof. Chris Frith, a brain researcher from University College, London, one of the letter's organizers, told Haaretz Magazine in a telephone interview that it later turned out that a number of the researchers who took part in the study have ties to a company that markets brain-imaging machines. He assails the attempt to seek this type of explanation for complex social phenomena, and notes that the public is very attracted to the idea of "reading minds." One sees the images of the brain with the colored regions and thinks one is seeing what happens to people in their thoughts, which is something no one was able to do before, Frith explains. But what people are not told is that these colors are simply numbers, representing levels of blood flow or electrical activity. There is no way to look at these images and know what a person is thinking.

Sometimes the misuse appears to be manipulative:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty," the authors write in the abstract to the article. They found that "greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern."

Dascal believes that the value of such studies is very limited. "It is completely unreasonable for something as complex as a political attitude to find expression in a particular place in the brain," he says. "The only way studies like this can be conducted is by radically simplifying the concept of the 'political attitude' they are trying to locate, to a degree that renders the study uninteresting."

Yes, it smells fishy to me too. Many people simply inherit their political affiliation or acquire it on the job. Consider, for example, the relationship between unionized labour and our Canadian socialist party, the New Democratic Party. People may vote for that party because they are union members and are canvassed at meetings. However, I often find that those same people have very conservative attitudes on many questions. And of course it works the same on the other side of the political spectrum.

I would not envy the neuroscientist whose job was to try to make something like this simple, when political loyalties are - by their very nature - not simple at all.

In any event, friends who work in the criminal justice system tell me that a key difficulty with this "mind reading" thing - if applied in the courts - is that many offenders actually don't have clearly defined motives. I told Stephanie, based on my friends' comments,

In fact, that’s 90 percent of the routine offender's problem. He doesn’t THINK. He doesn’t PLAN. He doesn’t have strategies for AVOIDING trouble.

Finding out what’s going on in his head isn’t much use because it isn’t valuable to him. He needs to change it, not study it.

To my mind, a justice system should help people voluntarily learn life skills, not fritz their brains.

I mean skills like: Finish high school, keep your job or find another one, pay your bills, learn anger management, don't make friends with people who lie or cheat, especially avoid people with a criminal record or a drug habit, and always avoid places that get raided by police.

Half the secret is just not being around when the police raid. (Because if he's been in the slam before, police assume he's guilty.)

Stephanie agrees, from her own experience. And I am NOT saying that neuroscience couldn't help. Mario's team, for example, did excellent work helping people get over spider phobia, as we recount in The Spiritual Brain. But I think it's important that any neuroscience work should be be voluntary, with informed consent.

Anyway, the article is a most interesting update on the whole "mind reading" controversy.

Culture: Neuro this and neuro that and neuro go away ....

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is sponsoring a long overdue project on the trend in modern culture that makes the brain (instead of the whole body) the vessel of our personhood:

Since the Decade of the Brain, several proto-disciplines, such as neurotheology, neuroeducation, neuroesthetics, neuropsychoanalysis, neuromarketing or neuroeconomics have advanced bold plans to reform the human sciences on the basis of knowledge about the brain. Driven by the availability of brain imaging technologies, particulary PET and fMRI, these fields tend to focus on the quest for “neural correlates” of behaviors and mental processes. The media, both popular and specialized, has given much room to these emergent fields; it has also reported on new forms of sociability and identity politics incarnate in the growing “neurodiversity” movement and various sorts of “neurocommunities; ” and it has been decisive in the process of turning brain scans into modern icons of personhood. Parallel to academic discourses and practices, but interacting with them at many levels, there is an expanding galaxy of neurobeliefs and neuropractices that go from learning how to draw or feel with one side of the brain, to various forms of neurohealthism, neuroascetics, neuroesotericism and neuroeschatology.

I’ve described this trend as "neurobullshipping." Of course we can learn a lot about ourselves from studying the human brain. My lead author Mario Bearegard learned a lot about mystical contemplation from his brain studies on Carmelite nuns, which we discuss in The Spiritual Brain.

But our brains do not sit in pickle jars. Our brains, minds, and bodies are a continuous feedback loop. All the information stored in our brains is learned through the exercise of our bodies and the focus of our attention is determined by our minds. Put another way, "neurobeliefs and neuropractices" are just beliefs and practices. I admit that I do not have any idea what "neuroesotericism and neuroeschatology" are, which is not the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Hat tip: Alan Yoshioka of Sheepcat fame.

Neurotheology - or neurobullshipping?

Mario, my lead author, dislikes the term "neurotheology", and now I know why. A recent article by Hannah Elliott in Associated Baptist Press News informs us:

Theories about correlations between the brain and beliefs are nothing new. Historians have speculated that figures like Joan of Arc, Saint Teresa of Avila, Fedor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust had aliments like epilepsy, which in turn led to their obsessions with the spiritual world.

Yes, but that is neurobullshipping, as we show in The Spiritual Brain.

Not only that, but it is neurobullshipping in the service of a materialist agenda. The article quotes Massimo Pigliucci:

If "we realize that mystical experiences originate from the same neurological mechanisms that underlie hallucinations ... I bet dollar to donut that the reality experienced by meditating Buddhists and praying nuns is entirely contained in their mind and is not a glimpse of a 'higher' realm, as tantalizing as that idea may be," he concluded.
Simmons called that criticism "on target." Neurotheology doesn't deal with theology as it is traditionally done -- trying to get religion and experience together with reasonable consistency, he said. Progress in the field will come mostly in mental health, he said.

He wasn't asked to unpack that statement.

Also,

Alston, who studied ethics and philosophy at Yale Divinity School, says criticism of neurotheology depends on who is receiving the information. Much of it has to do with the difference between the physical brain and the metaphysical mind. Some experts believe that ideas in the mind cause action, while others say chemicals in the brain cause action -- and if chemicals are altered in the brain, behaviors will change, Alston said.
Either way of thinking is okay, since neurotheologists aren't interested in changing firmly held beliefs, he said.

Bu what does this mean? If "ideas in the mind cause action", the mind is real, and people who have a spiritual experience might contact something outside themselves. If "chemicals in the brain cause action", the mind is an illusion created by the action of these chemicals and people who have a spiritual experience are simply the victims of an odd conflation of chemicals.

Alston goes on:

"What I'm trying to do with neurotheology is to explain that each of these has a way with relating to the subject matter," he said. "It once again depends on the standing point of a person in terms of if they're a biologist and what their tools are and if they are a psychologist and what their tools are."

No, sorry, Alston. That will not work. You must establish which of these propositions is true in order to fruitfully study religious, spiritual, or mystical experiences, because they lead in entirely different directions.

Hat tip to Stephanie West of Brains on Purpose.