Neuroscience: More on the You Do Voodoo neuroscience

In the NewsWeek blog, Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain, writes,

Since the original criticism of fMRI studies earlier this year by Ed Vul and his colleagues, neuroscientists seem to have gotten more aware of statistical pitfalls that can skew their results. But there is no question that passions are running high and that back-biting and defensiveness have set in. At least one attempt to get critics and criticized together in the same room blew up.

Well, if all these people were little rays of sunshine, that wouldn't be happening, right?

Go here for background on this growing controversy on the usefulness of social neuroscience.

I have said before and let me say it again: I think neuroscience should be firmly anchored in medicine, not in random searches for all kinds of political or social information.

If neuroscience can help Grandpa Joe keep his memory a few years longer or cousin Jane (the one who never had any luck in school) learn a bit better (without drugs), there will be objective ways to measure the findings - and there will be people who encourage its funding, even in hard times.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Neuroscience: Pop neuroscience not living up to hype?

In "Who do voodoo? They do - Social neuroscientists, that is," (January 20, 2009), I talked about the new paper, "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience," in press at Perspectives on Psychological Science (lead author Edward Vul) which makes paper dolls out of social neuroscience.

Discover Magazine seems to have picked up the story, calling it a "pugnacious" paper - which it is, sort of. But the thing is, if social neuroscience is as silly as it sounds, it's better to admit that it is all a sort of joke now, rather than have others point it out later, when something decidedly unfunny has happened. From Discover:

At the very least, though, Pashler’s paper [pdf] illuminates pitfalls in the interpretation of fMRI scans. In an interconnected network of billions of neurons, it is unlikely that any single brain region is responsible for an experience—even if media coverage touting the “love center of the brain” suggests otherwise. Cunningham maintains that fMRI is gradually helping scientists make sense of the human mind, but he admits that “there’s a tendency for the data to be oversold, so it ultimately doesn’t live up to the hype.

It's nice to see Discover acknowledging that pop science writing has done much to spread simplistic ideas about the mind and the brain.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

At MercatorNet: Why women love shopping, and other myths

The world today is drowning in false knowledge - the things we know that ain't really so. The false knowledge is often bolstered by apparent - but not real - science, typically driven by wicked new toys.

Social neuroscience is a major contender in the current false knowledge industry. This "discipline" depends on statistics derived from current brain imaging techniques.

As Newsweek's Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain, notes, social neuroscience supposedly shows why women love shopping, why gay guys read maps like women, why jealous guys (as opposed to gals)...

Come to think of it, why does social neuroscience only tell us what we keep hearing from that high school drop-out cousin who listens to a lot of TV while shooting pool down in the rec room, between his split shifts at the loading dock?

Go here for more.

Neuroscience: "Social neuroscience" is down for the count

This just in from the British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog:

The brain imaging community is about to experience another shockwave, just days after the online leak of a paper that challenged many of the brain-behaviour correlations reported in respected social neuroscience journals.

Social neuroscience (which I take to be a classic example of false knowledge) depends in large part on measured changes in blood flow. However,

The interpretation of human brain imaging experiments is founded on the idea that changes in blood flow reflect parallel changes in neuronal activity. This important new study shows that blood flow changes can be anticipatory and completely unconnected to any localised neuronal activity. It's up to future research to find out which brain areas and cognitive mechanisms are controlling this anticipatory blood flow. As the researchers said, their finding points to a "novel anticipatory brain mechanism."

Writing a commentary on this paper in the same journal issue, David Leopold at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, said the findings were "sure to raise eyebrows among the human fMRI research community."

If anyone went to jail over "social neuroscience" findings, I hope they get released soon, and sue the government. Whatever happened to science that was cautious? Science should always be cautious, especially in areas like this.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose.