Brains On Purpose™

Brain overclaim syndrome: Can I convince you I know something by citing neuroscience?

Are so many mediators citing neuroscience these days because it is cool? Hot? Fashionable? I don't know. That the science being cited is often either inaccurate or not helpful to conflict resolution is sometimes a tad disturbing.

Even though I have blogged about it before, I had forgotten about the phrase "brain overclaim syndrome" until reading this book review from Scientific American. Maybe it partially explains the growth of brain science being mentioned in mediation circles?

Although the book being reviewed is not about conflict resolution, a couple of the paragraphs are relevant to the proliferation of neuroscience in the dispute field . . .

This is where the book truly disappoints. Rather than simply giving us straight talk about how disorganized our thoughts and lives are (but we knew that) and how we can do better (tell us, please!), Levitin insists on informing us repeatedly and in detail about how various regions or pathways in the brain are “involved in” the various cognitive and behavioral phenomena he surveys. He really means that increased neural activity in these areas of the brain is correlated with certain behavioral and cognitive phenomena, which actually means only that such activity tends to occur at about the same time as the behavioral and cognitive phenomena. That is not saying much, which is why Levitin keeps implying more with that vague phrase, “involved in.”

University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephen Morse has dubbed this practice the “brain overclaim syndrome”—the pathological tendency to fool people into thinking you have a profound understanding of something by pointing to brain studies. It goes without saying that any distinctive thing we do—raising an arm, thinking of sheep or shouting, “Hooray!”—must be accompanied by some corresponding neural activity, but that does not explain the activity.

(Click to read the rest of the review.) How much is neuroscience being used today as a trendy camouflage of basic psychology or wisdom or common sense? What does brain science add to any of those three? Typically nothing or not much, in my opinion. What do you think? What has neuroscience brought us that has changed the practice of mediation?

Adding "neuro" to a word supposedly adds credibility but often signals neurohype

Listen to Christian Jarrett, neuroscientist turned science writer, describing the many myths about the brain covered in today's media (kuow.org). The interview of Jarrett is less than 10 minutes long and worth a few minutes of your time. Jarrett has a new book coming out in the fall titled Great Myths of the Brain. I am looking forward to the read.

Seven challenges when using the neuroscience lens to see the world

Over the years, I have learned that people reading this blog come from a wide range of belief systems, including atheist, agnostic, and those involved to large or small degree in various spiritual and religious practices. Although this blog post to which I am linking today is written by a Christian and part of the post is from a Christian perspective, I think anyone can learn from what Dr. William Struthers calls the Seven Dangerous Neuro-Temptations (The Table, blog of Biola University). Click to see how he defines neuro-essentialism, neuro-manipulation, neuro-divination, neuro-absolution, neuro-narcissism, neuro-normalcy, and neuro-privilege.

5 minutes worth watching: A dose of skepticism about benefits of meditation and value of fMRIs

Because scientists don't have a sophisticated knowledge of meditation, they have defaulted to measuring meditation expertise by the number of hours a person has practiced, says Dr. Willoughby Britton. This way of defining expert meditators is both misleading and skews research results. She then quotes the old adage: Practice does not make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect. One of problems she cites that results from this lack of understanding is the benefits of meditation are being "way over-hyped."

In this entertaining video clip, she also talks about the Blobology Effect: If we see something explained or proven by a colorful blob on a fMRI scan, we tend to think it is true, even if preposterous. The fMRI becomes a marketing opportunity, and the Blobology Effect underscores how impoverished our self-knowledge is if we need to look to technology to read how we are feeling in our minds and bodies.

The short video of caution is worth watching. Click now to view The Blobology Effect.

Note: Click to watch another recommended video of Dr. Britton, this one on happiness, habit, neuroplasticity, self-criticism, judgment of others, and attention. From the site:

In this TEDxTalk, Professor Willoughby Britton tells us that happiness is not about getting what you want. She discusses our mental qualities as habits we practice and she sheds light on an important link between neuroscience and contemplative studies.

Resistance to evidence: A possible reason mediators make unsubstantiated claims?

It is often a mystery to me why mediators will make statements about the practice of conflict resolution that are unproven or even inconsistent with research. Now, after reading "Why many clinical psychologists are resistant to evidence-based practice: Root causes and constructive remedies" (Clinical Psychology Review), I think I have some clues. Although the article is focusing on therapists, I believe it may relate to the attitudes and opinions of some conflict professionals.

The article does not help much to explain why mediators will make assertions about (and Tweet and reTweet) research they have not read (getting their information only from abstracts or press releases), but it does perhaps shed some light on other of their claims.

The authors in the article list six reasons for resistance to EBP (evidence-based practice). One of them is "naïve realism, which can lead clinicians to conclude erroneously that client change is due to an intervention itself rather than to a host of competing explanations." From the section on naive realism (cites removed for ease of reading):

How influenced are we by images of brain scans? Maybe not as much as we used to be?

While visions of brain scans dance in our head, we may not be as impressed by them as we were a few years ago. Or maybe we never were all that impressed? Just how impressed were we—and how impressed are we now? These are questions to which we have yet to find clear answers.

Here are some pieces of that puzzle though. From "'Brain Porn' Not So Seductive After All?" (NPR):

There's something deeply compelling about "seeing" the mind at work with the help of relatively new neuroscientific tools, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which furnish the images of brain activation that often accompany popular science coverage. Indeed, a well-known 2008 paper by McCabe and Castel reported that people thought articles containing fMRI images of the brain reflected better scientific reasoning than matched articles that did not.

...

Yet a series of recent papers suggests the story may be more complex. If we are seduced by neuroscience, it might not be the pretty pictures that people find so alluring.

...

So brain images may have some effect on people's responses to scientific news reports, but it's unlikely to be a particularly powerful or pervasive one. These new results challenge both the 2008 findings and the compelling intuition that there's something special about a picture of the brain.

First, why the failure to replicate the original 2008 results?

Click to read the rest.

What do you really, really know? Is intellectual humility important in conflict resolution?

Listening to Ellen Langer talk about mindfulness is always delightful, entertaining, and re-mindful. For example, click to watch "Mindfulness over Matter" (Pop!Tech). In this talk she tells the story about a horse and a hot dog (one you may have heard before as she often tells the tale). Here it is from another talk "The Power of Mindful Teaching" (Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning):

To illustrate her point about "facts," she recounts being at a horse event with a friend who asked her to look after his horse while he went to get the horse a hot dog. "Horses don't eat meat," she thought, "period." The idea "flew in the face of the facts," she thought. But then the owner returned with a hot dog and the horse ate it eagerly.

And so the "fact" was wrong at least today in this context, and that prompted lots of questions in Langer's mind. "Which horses [hadn't eaten meat]? When? How hungry were the horses? What kind of horses? [There are] a bunch of questions," she says, "that once we ask them, we see that this information we've been given is probably probabilistic. Indeed, research only gives us probabilities and we transform those probabilities into absolute facts. When you know something is absolute then there's no reason to think about it anymore. But when you know something in this conditional way, then it almost primes thinking of counter instances. There are hidden decisions that go into any research program - What breed of horse? What kind of hot dog?-and once you reveal these hidden decisions, you begin to see how situated and contextual what we accept as facts actually are. One of the cultural myths is a belief in the absolute nature of science, but science itself is based on probability." 

Falsely assuming the truth of facts is often related to discomfort with uncertainty and ambiguity: Rather than remain with presence and patience in a place of not knowing, people may want to rid themselves of uncertainty and so prematurely leap to an answer that seems true. That rush to resolution may lead to an answer that feels comfortable but may be faulty. How often do we see this happening in conflict resolution? (Isn't one role of a mediator to facilitate courage in parties to stay in the uncertainty if doing so may result in a better solution?)

Before I saw Langer's talk today, I read a chapter this morning which also reaffirmed the value of intellectual humility (or being comfortable with the awareness of how much we do not know). The chapter from The Mind in Context is titled "On the Vices of Nominalization and the Virtues of Contextualizing". The authors talk about how what we know is very context-dependent; what is true in one situation may not be true in others. (Reminds me of my Maxim of SIN.)

Extensive evidence exists for context effects. Regardless of one's theoretical orientation, there can be no doubt that context effects are ubiquitous. When a phenomenon is studied carefully, it typically does not behave the same way across contexts. Regardless of whether the phenomenon is genetic, neural, cognitive, behavioral, social, or cultural, it is likely to exhibit extensive sensitivity to context, ...

So what do you know? Are you sure? Do you think intellectual humility has value in dispute resolution? If so, how are you fostering it in yourself? In clients?

I hope this post with its links to useful resources reminds us to take any research upon which we rely or to which we refer with a large dose of questioning. Possible questions: Is this true? If so, when and where and with whom?

Forget dated ideas about left & right hemispheres-New research provides more nuanced view of the brain

Excerpt from "A New Map of How We Think: Top Brain/Bottom Brain" (Wall Street Journal), an article extracted from a forthcoming book:

Who hasn't heard that people are either left-brained or right-brained—either analytical and logical or artistic and intuitive, based on the relative "strengths" of the brain's two hemispheres? How often do we hear someone remark about thinking with one side or the other?

A flourishing industry of books, videos and self-help programs has been built on this dichotomy. You can purportedly "diagnose" your brain, "motivate" one or both sides, indulge in "essence therapy" to "restore balance" and much more. Everyone from babies to elders supposedly can benefit. The left brain/right brain difference seems to be a natural law.

Except that it isn't. The popular left/right story has no solid basis in science. The brain doesn't work one part at a time, but rather as a single interactive system, with all parts contributing in concert, as neuroscientists have long known. ...

. . .

There is a better way to understand the functioning of the brain, based on another, ordinarily overlooked anatomical division—between its top and bottom parts. We call this approach "the theory of cognitive modes." Built on decades of unimpeachable research that has largely remained inside scientific circles, it offers a new way of viewing thought and behavior ... .

Click to read the rest. See the book's Web site. And watch an interview with coauthor Stephen Kosslyn.

Using neuroscience in your personal or professional life? Reading this book may make you more discerning—and accurate

I often warn about the neuroscience I see and hear in the field of conflict resolution because some (maybe much) of it ranges from mildly inaccurate to wildly outlandish. Now, if I want to inject some caution in the conversation, I can recommend a new, easy-to-read book: Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.

When I was at the annual conference of Association for Psychological Science (APS) last month, I heard the book's coauthor Dr. Scott Lilienfeld speak. However, he was not the only presenter warning about the prevalence of neuromyths; for example, Professor Daniel Willingham talked about how rampant inaccurate brain "science" is in the field of education. Flaky, fluffy, false neuroscience seems to be infiltrating many arenas in addition to conflict resolution.

An excerpt from a Wall Street Journal book review of Brainwashed:

[N]euroscientific techniques—fMRI is one of many—provide plenty to be excited about. The authors of "Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience," while sharing in this enthusiasm, offer a more skeptical take. At issue for psychiatrist Sally Satel and clinical psychologist Scott Lilienfeld is "neurocentrism," or "the view that human experience and behavior can be best explained from the predominant or even exclusive perspective of the brain." In their concise and well-researched book, they offer a reasonable and eloquent critique of this fashionable delusion, chiding the premature or unnecessary application of brain science to commerce, psychiatry, the law and ethics.

Click to read a Salon excerpt from the book. Also an excerpt from Slate.

Yes, I have been a neurocurmudgeon for several years but now, in 2013, perhaps books such as this and presentations like I heard at APS will bring a new level of discernment and accuracy to the use of neuroscience in conflict resolution. I can hope . . .

Note: I call my above photo "Jumbled Science."

Lessons from Poe: Detecting the Inner Mediator—Join us this May in Baltimore

I will be presenting three programs in Baltimore on May 2 and 3. They are being offered by the ADR Section of the Maryland Bar Association at Westminster Hall, site of the Edgar Allan Poe crypt. Below is the description of the day-long program being held on May 2. I will also give a keynote that evening.

And, if 20 people register by April 1, we will have a practicum on May 3 based on the day-long program from the day before. More information and registration for May 2 here. If you are interested in the practicum, please email David Simison. [Note added April 3: We are no longer taking sign-ups for the practicum.]

I hope to see many of you there!

Lessons from Poe: Detecting the Inner Mediator

Poe is acknowledged by many as the genius who invented the detective story and inspired the genre of science fiction. Over 150 years after his death, we can still learn much from the imagination of this author and poet.

A skilled mediator is a supreme detective. The foremost, primary, and threshold mystery to solve: What method of mediation is best suited to the individual conflict professional, the parties, and the conflict. We will use an assessment approach to facilitate that first solution.

The clues a mediator must be able to read with precision involve self-awareness and self-knowledge, discovery of purpose, theory of mind (or discovering what's in the minds of other people), and razor focus on solutions, not problems. We will take our magnifying glasses to those topics and sharpen those skills.

What's science fiction have to do with mediation? Currently conflict resolution training is full of neuroscience that is fiction. We will separate the facts from the fiction and hype. We'll look at

"Mirror neurons - the most hyped concept in neuroscience?" Maybe tied with oxytocin

Which is more hyped? Mirror neurons or oxytocin? I guess it depends on the day you're asking, or the blogs you are reading, or the conferences you are attending. There's is no doubt that the silliness surrounding both is a wonder to watch. Some people have a need to reduce their worlds to simple notions; mirror neurons and oxytocin are two concepts they've grabbed onto with avid vigor and ignorant excitement.

Click to read some past posts about the oxytocin hype. Today I bring to your attention to a post on mirror neuron brainlessness, published on a Psychology Today blog by Dr. Christian Jarrett. From "Mirror neurons - the most hyped concept in neuroscience?":

Motor cells that respond to the sight of other people moving are intriguing, there’s no doubt. It’s likely they play a role in important social cognitions. But to claim that they make us empathic, and to raise them up as neuroscience’s holy grail, as the ultimate brain-based root of humanity, is ridiculous. The evidence I’ve mentioned is admittedly somewhat biased, designed to counteract the hype and show just how much debate and doubt persists. In fact, the very existence of mirror neurons in the human brain is still disputed by some. That’s where we’re at with the study of these cells. We’re still trying to find out whether they exist in humans, where they are, and what exactly it is they do. Mirror neurons are fascinating but they aren’t the answer to what makes us human. [Sorry. I can't get Typepad to indent the quote.]

Click to read the rest. The post's a good antidote to the presentations one hears and reads by those overly taken with mirror neurons.

Neuro-nitwittery and brain aberrations: Why are people brain-crazed?

Why has putative neuroscience flooded the culture? And why don't some people recognize how much brain science is over-hyped? What is that people are really seeking when they buy the pop-science books or attend the neuro-this and neuro-that presentations? What do readers of these books (and articles) and attendees of these events think neuroscience can provide? Chances are high that whatever is being sought will not be delivered by brain science.

Everyday this neuro thing becomes more widespread; the number of pilgrims to Mount Brain grows; the promises of what the brain can tell us increase in outlandishness. Fortunately, articles and blog posts are being written to warn us about the growing brain silliness. Today I call your attention to two.

From "Your brain on pseudoscience" (NewStatesman):

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

...

Distortion of what and how much we know is bound to occur, Paul Fletcher points out, if the literature is cherry-picked.

“Having outlined your theory,” he says, “you can then cite a finding from a neuroimaging study identifying, for example, activity in a brain region such as the insula . . . You then select from among the many theories of insula function, choosing the one that best fits with your overall hypothesis, but neglecting to mention that nobody really knows what the insula does or that there are many ideas about its possible function.”

But the great movie-monster of nearly all the pop brain literature is another region: the amygdala. It is