Brains On Purpose™

Those ol' Tweety Birds just keep rolling out inaccurate science Tweets all day

As they have been doing for years now, people are still Tweeting and reTweeting links to questionable press releases and articles about psychology, biology, and neuroscience. I watch these fly by in the Twitter stream and wonder why people do this? What is their motivation and reward for throwing junk into the stream?

Tweety Birds are what I call these people who pass links along using as much discrimination as people playing Gossip at a party.

I posted about this in February: Virtuous Tweeting: Do you really, really, really want to send that "science" Tweet? And in February of 2011: Be on guard for psychobabble and brain silliness: Are the numbers of science groupies increasing? I am sure there are probably other past posts in which I have pondered this practice by Tweety Birds.

I was reminded of the Birds today not only by some Tweets but by an article. "The Science News Cycle of Life: Rise, Fall, and Renewal" has an odd conclusion but this quote from the article is related to what I am now highlighting.

[M]edia outlets rely on press releases to both receive and understand new research. Sites like Science Daily and Eureka Alert post these press releases as soon as the embargo lifts. Since research and science is complicated, reporters rely on these sites not only to find the day's latest findings, but to understand what a 60 page write-up means for non-science people. University communications departments put the findings into nice digestible little sound-bites, complete with quotes from the researchers. And since they too want pick-up, they often slap their own snappy headline on the write-up.

Snappy headlines are not the only problem. As I discuss here and here, the press releases often do not report the research accurately. When inaccurate press releases get passed along in the Twitter stream, that inaccuracy problem is compounded. I again ask: Why are people choosing to be a part of this compounding? What is their motivation? What is their reward? I really am mystified.

Teaching kids about the brain: Foresight or flapdoodle? (Question applies to adults, too)

A new article in the New York Times about a school founded by an alternative theater troupe has resulted in some interesting responses; for example, on Twitter: click here or here or here or here or here. The school incorporates practices they claim are brain-based. I guess only time and some rigorous research will tell if the approach is effective in helping kids learn and achieve.

From "Making Education Brain Science":

[Y]oung children at the Blue School learn about what has been called “the amygdala hijack” — what happens to their brains when they flip out. Teachers try to get children into a “toward state,” in which they are open to new ideas. Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control. Last year, the curriculum guide was amended to include the term “meta-cognition”: the ability to think about thinking.

...

For all the attention brain science is receiving in schools, experts say it is too soon to know whether its application will lead to improved academic outcomes. And some researchers say that while they embrace new ideas — especially around self-control — they personally prefer a more traditional approach to pedagogy.

“The older approach has led to some very good outcomes,” said Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University and co-author of “Welcome to Your Child’s Brain,” a child development primer for parents.

With brain science achieving much more time in the public spotlight, including in the arena of conflict resolution, some of the techniques and theories seeping out of research labs will be be bogus and some will be bona fide. Just a few years from now, we'll know more about what truly helps kids—and adults. In the meanwhile, as I have often warned, be careful, be conservative, be cautious.

In any popular application of neuroscience, you will find people who are careful, conservative, and cautious about what they say, and you will also find the people skilled at marketing. The latter group

What DON'T we know about the brain? Vast amounts, whole oceans and skies worth

Every so often something comes in one of my Google alerts about how much we do not know about the brain. Those articles and posts make me smile as they are excellent reminders to stay away from brain statements, schemes, and stories that are overreaching or even fantasy extrapolations.

No matter how many of these pieces appear that describe our paucity of knowledge, we still see many more articles purporting to tell us how our brains behave and often how to use that information to change other people or ourselves.

Of course, what we know so far about the brain can be very helpful in changing and creating habits, and in communicating with others. But we don't know as much as many would have you believe. I remind myself frequently to be discerning when reading and hearing about the brain, investigate the sources, follow and appreciate experts I trust.

Why? I don't think I would be exaggerating to say more than half of what is in the popular media is partially, if not completely, inaccurate. The brain is trendy right now, a hot topic, and neuro-anything seems to attract people. Ultimately the reason I grow more skeptical over the years is an issue of integrity; don't we all need to be responsible about what we tell others—on any topic?

Here's an except from a "Clear up this fuzzy thinking on brain scans" (Nature), a Google-alert treat that arrived in my inbox today.

Hardly a week goes by without the media showcasing beautiful three-dimensional images of the brain in action, which supposedly explain how and why humans do the things we do. Most recently, people have pretended that they can use neuroimaging alone to identify paedophiles or prove that we fall in love with mobile phones.

The limits of the technology, together with our incomplete picture of how the brain functions, make it hard to take these claims seriously. But, regardless of the doubts expressed by many neuroscientists, the appeal of brain images, and the illusion they offer of understanding and explaining our daily behaviour, continues to grow.

Click to read the rest. A related post: Virtuous Tweeting: Do you really, really, really want to send that "science" Tweet?

Virtuous Tweeting: Do you really, really, really want to send that "science" Tweet?

Why do people pass on items before scrutinizing them? Some members of my Tweeter gang regularly Tweet press releases from such sources as Science Daily as if they were news. Then these Tweets are reTweeted and the peeping and chirping and crowing of Tweety birds grows louder and louder.

In a post from Arstechnica, the practice of treating such aggregators as PhysOrg and Science Daily as news was criticized:

[I]n a large number of contexts, these two sites are treated as credible sources of scientific information. Items posted there make frequent appearances on social news sites, and a number of people I've talked to have been shocked to discover that the majority of the sites' content is nothing more than rebranded press releases.

Ultimately, the job of editing and of peer review is to help ensure that only scientifically valid data and ideas end up in the literature. The job of the press should be to ensure that the public only receives reports of equal quality (or better, since the press can act as an additional layer of filtering). Unfortunately, with the rise of the press release, and of aggregators that disguise press releases as news content, the public is not being well served in this regard.

I have not forgotten a Tweet from Todd Stark last month in which he responded to this problem and wrote:

Aggregator problem reinforces the need to understand and filter before passing on. A new virtue for the 21st century!

A new virtue. I like that suggestion. Wouldn't it be nice if people did some digging prior to Tweeting? Even chickens don't eat

Good review of the tome MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY, an antidote to left-brain, right-brain mythology

If you go to your local bookstore, you'll see that a lot of junk science about the left and right hemispheres of the brain is still being published. That's why I was so glad to learn a bit over a year ago about a terrific book that gets the science right.

I have blogged more than once about this book titled The Master and His Emissary (links to those posts below), and have recommend it many, many, many times. A new review of the book has just been published in Los Angeles Review of Books and I wanted to make sure you saw it if you have any interest in brain hemispheres.

From "Oppositional Thinking: On reconciling the two hemispheres of the brain":

...In the 1970s and 1980s, the “split brain” became a hot topic in neuroscience, and soon popular wisdom produced a flood of books explaining how the left brain was a “scientist” and the right an “artist.”

Much insight into human psychology can be gleaned from these popular accounts, but “hard” science soon recognized that this simple dichotomy could not accommodate the wealth of data that ongoing research into hemispheric function produced. And as no “real” scientist wants to be associated with popular misconceptions — for fear of peer disapproval — the fact that ongoing research revealed no appreciable functional differences between the hemispheres — they both seemed to “do” the same things, after all — made it justifiable for neuroscientists to put the split-brain question on the back burner, where it has pretty much stayed. Until now.

Links to previous posts on the book:

• Are you involved in half-brained mediations? Let's promote full-brained conflict resolution
• Review of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
• About the vast left-brain conspiracy and those driven to ecstasy by all things neuro
• The brain and culture: "The mind's great conflict spills over onto the world stage"

Valentine's Day news: Love is more than just chemicals in the brain--P.S. So is conflict

Understanding love by taking a look at the brain is a bit like understanding a car's driver by looking under the hood of the car he's driving. Such an attempt at comprehending love would be ultimately futile. It's not cognizant of the human spirit. Not wise. Not accurate.

Unfortunately some conflict professionals are now reducing conflict to the brain, too. They say something like, "The brain does 'A' so you should counter with move 'B'." Conflict and love are not that simple; we are more than the organ in our skull. They are not like chess games played on the board of the brain.

I knew when I saw a deeply reductionist notion of love titled "the brain in love" (Delancyplace.com) that it would not sit well with my favorite non-reductionist neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz. Smiling to myself, I sent the over-the-top-materialist post to him. Here's what Jeff wrote:

Now if hearing all this makes you nauseous, that's related to activity in a small area of you brain called the area postrema.  Interestingly, drugs that block dopamine will tend to decrease the nausea. And if you're left with a strong sense of "hey, there's got to be a LOT more to love than this," CONGRATS!  You're part of the hopefully not-too-rapidly-diminishing remnant of sane people who realize YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN.

To learn more about the difference between the mind and the brain and how we are so much more than our brain, read one of the books Jeff has written: You Are Not Your Brain or The Mind and the Brain. If you are tempted to believe that your romance is governed by your oxytocin, better read one of these books quickly, before February 14.

Love is more than just an emotion resulting from some chemicals your brain. To think love is brought to us by chemicals removes not only the romance but the poetry and the humanity. Let's make February 14th a day of deep appreciation, devotion, and affection, not of a bromidic and limited inner neuro-pharmacy.

Note (added February 8, 2012): Another person who thinks love arises from the brain: "Author Horstman draws on neuroscience to explore love" (Marin Independent Journal). Excerpt:

"Everything happens in the brain. It's your biggest and strongest sex and love organ," says [Judith] Horstman.

Rescuing the amygdala from the swamp of pop culture

Coming on the heels of my blog post Clearing up confusion: The amygdala is not the same as the reptile brain & it's probably not reserved for fear is a news release from Association of Psychological Sciences with more information which I hope will continue the cleaning up of the amygdala's reputation in the media. And clear up its role in our day-to-day to lives.

The release:

The Amygdala And Fear Are Not The Same Thing

In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated – displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of black people. This link between the amygdala and fear – especially a fear of others unlike us, has gone too far, not only in pop culture, but also in psychological science, say the authors of a new paper which will be published in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Indeed, many experiments have found that the amygdala is active when people are afraid. But it also activates at other times, for example in response to pleasant photographs and happy faces.

The misconception came from how scientists first approached studying the brain. A lot of people came to the amygdala from the study of fear, says Wil Cunningham of Ohio State University, who co wrote the new paper with Tobias Brosch of New York University. “It’s a great emotion to study because it’s very important, evolutionarily, and we know a lot about fear in animals,” Cunningham says. Almost every study of fear finds that the amygdala is active. But that doesn’t mean every spark of activity in the amygdala means the person is afraid.

Instead, the amygdala seems to be doing something more subtle: processing events that are related to what a person cares about at the moment. So if you’re in a scary situation or have an anxious personality, the amygdala might be activated by a frightening image. But hungry people have increased amygdala activity in response to pictures of food and people who are very empathetic have an amygdala response to seeing other people.

“When we’re studying emotion, people want to find specific brain parts that are associated with different

Clearing up confusion: The amygdala is not the same as the reptile brain & it's probably not reserved for fear

The amygdala gets lots of attention in conflict resolution circles these days, but not all of what is said is accurate. For example, the amydala's role in fear seems often to be the sole focus. Therefore, I was very glad to see Wray Herbert write a post refining the idea of the role of the amygdala beyond just being the "fear center."  From "Fleeing the Brain’s Fear Center" (Association for Psychological Science blogs).

Cunningham and Brosch conducted a thorough review of the vast literature on amygdala function, and their analysis also reveals a lot of individual variation in amygdala activity. Some subjects respond more to positive and negative stimuli than to neutral stimuli; others mostly to negative stimuli; and still others to positive information. In other words, amygdala activation may not have the same meaning for everyone; it may instead reflect the psychological state of the individual. The amygdala appears initially to evaluate the relevance of stimuli, and then to tune the individual’s overall cognitive and emotional response.

These varying responses may reflect personality to some degree. ...

...

All of these recent findings, taken together, call into question the whole idea of brain modules that govern specific, universal emotions like fear, sadness, disgust and surprise. The new and more dynamic view of the amygdala—and the brain—raises doubts about such an emotional taxonomy. ...

I urge you to read the whole post, which includes an interesting section on racial prejudice.

I believe what we can say about the amygdala is that it

"Neuroscience, Normativity, and Retributivism"

Abstract:

Advocates for the increased use of neuroscience in law have made bold and provocative claims about the power of neuroscientific discoveries to transform the criminal law in ways large and small. Perhaps the boldest and most provocative of these claims are made in an influential article by Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen. They claim that neuroscience will reveal that criminal defendants are not morally responsible for their actions and that this revelation will thereby undermine retributivist justifications for criminal punishment. In the process of resolving previously intractable debates between consequentialism and retributivism, neuroscience will also, they contend, resolve age-old debates about free will. In this essay, we discuss several serious problems with their argument. We maintain that no neuroscientific discoveries will lead to the sorts of changes predicted by Greene and Cohen and, even if they did, those changes would not be the product of neuroscientific insight but result from unwarranted and problematic inferences which ought to be resisted.

Click to download the rest of "Neuroscience, Normativity, and Retributivism" (SSRN-THE FUTURE OF PUNISHMENT, Thomas Nadelhoffer, ed., Oxford University Press, Forthcoming-U of Alabama Public Law Research Paper No. 1968552).

"We are people, not brains": Is the "uncritical use" of neuroscience "oozing" into mediation?

If you follow my blogs, you know I have for years been decrying the people who tell us that knowledge of the brain can solve conflicts. Sure, knowing how the brain works can be helpful in some—probably not many yet—broad and not-always-fully-understood ways.

Should conflict professionals learn about the brain? Of course. However, in some circles, the application of neuroscience to conflict resolution has gone into the zone of fiction to a degree that should cause head shaking.

A new book seems to present assistance in getting sober from the neuroscience intoxication that has seeped into corners of the conflict resolution community. Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain will be keeping me occupied during any free time over the Thanksgiving holidays. I have been anticipating the book since hearing its author Dr. Michael Gazzaniga speak last May.

Reading a review of the book today increased my anticipation. From "Rethinking Thinking" (Wall Street Journal):

Many aspects of everyday human consciousness elude neural reduction. For we belong to a boundless, infinitely elaborated community of minds that has been forged out of a trillion cognitive handshakes over hundreds of thousands of years. This community is the theater of our daily existence. It separates life in the jungle from life in the office, and because it is a community of minds, it cannot be inspected by looking at the activity of the solitary brain.

Yes, I agree! But, alas, Raymond Tallis, the author of the article, writes so much better than I do.

I have also blogged about neurolaw here and at idealawg. On that topic, Tallis writes:

The amygdala is the fear center? Come on, mediators, let's wise up (and be as wise as our grandmothers)

A lot of what is being said about the neuroscience of conflict resolution is cringe-worthy. Not only is research often done on college students, in the artificial setting of a lab, being presented as if it applies to real-life conflicts, but also as if we know for sure how people act outside the lab.

One of many criticisms I have about these this-is-your-brain-on-conflict assertions is that many are too reductionist. Dr. Will Meecham expresses my frustration with reductionism much better than I can. From "Computers of Flesh?" (PsychCentral):

It frustrates me that ... it has become difficult to say anything about human behavior without invoking the findings of neuroscience. Although meditation clearly helps people cope, and has done so for millennia, its benefits now need the imprimatur of functional MR scanning in order to be accepted. Although building positive activities into one’s lifestyle can assist with battling addiction, we apparently need to hear this common sense advice framed as neuroscience before we’ll take it seriously.

If it were just a question of objective science validating ancient wisdom, I’d have no complaint. But because of the neuroscience perspective, human behavior is now viewed as a product of computations carried out in brain tissue. Different aspects of our experience get ascribed to named nuclei in the brain. Thus, the amygdala is our ‘fear center,’ the hippocampus is a ‘memory module,’ and so on.

These descriptions are not only highly reductionist, and therefore a bit suspect, they are also gross

Given the diversity of reviews, I am curious to read THE SOCIAL ANIMAL and come to my own opinion

The good, the bad, and the ugly. Reviews of David Brooks' new book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement are certainly not monolithic.

Looking at the list of books [pdf] he read in order to research The Social Animal, I probably will not agree with all that he has written. The authors he lists are for the most part a crew of materialists.

Some of the reviews (I'll continue to add to these links):

• "The Social Animal" (Christian Science Monitor)
• "David Brooks Defines The New 'Social Animal'" (NPR)
• A review critical of the science included in the book: "The Mind Readers" (Wall Street Journal)
• The most negative review I have seen: "David Brooks' dream world for the trust-fund set" (Salon)
• "The Social Animal by David Brooks: A Scornful Review" (Forbes blogs)
• "Mean Street: What David Brooks Got Wrong and Montaigne Got Right" (Wall Street Journal blogs)
• "David Brooks’s Theory of Human Nature" (New York Times)
• "'The Social Animal,' by David Brooks" (San Francisco Chronicle)
• "A case for the supremacy of the unconscious mind" (Boston Globe)
• "Social Animalapalooza" a series of reviews at Forbes blogs
• "Thinking and Talking: Where's the Human in David Brooks' Social Animal?" (Psychology Today blog)
• "David Brooks: The man who can measure true happiness" (Guardian)

Click to listen to Brooks talk about the book: Charlie Rose interview. Click to read an excerpt of the book from The New Yorker. Here's an excerpt from The New York Times. And an animated video depicting a selection of Chapter 5. Click to watch a TED video of Brooks talking about topics covered in the book.