Category: Brain imaging

More on persuasive, irrelevant ‘neuroscience’

Continuing on the subject from my previous post, Mark Liberman has a nifty little post on ‘The Functional Neuroanatomy of Science Journalism’ on the blog, Language Log (tip of the hat to Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock for alerting me to this one). Liberman points out some of the same things that I argued in the previous post, but he also brings in a very careful reading of a number of recent pieces in the press that attracted quite a bit of attention while really offering very little in the way of something new, except for the Unexpected Flavor of Neuroscience to spice things up!

One of the pieces that Liberman discusses is an article on the ‘hard-wiring’ of maternal instincts that Daniel explored in an earlier post, ‘Headline: Maternal Instinct Is Wired Into The Brain.’ Liberman nominates the original article by Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times as an example of what he believes is a leading candidate for the ‘Most Pernicious Science Narrative of the Decade’:

1. Consider the hypothesis that (Stereotypical-Observation-X-About-People).
2. Brain Researcher Y used fMRI to show that (some experimental proxy for) X is (somewhat) true. Now we know!
3a. Optional bonus #1: Now we know why! It happens (somewhere) in the brain!
3b: Optional bonus #2: This shows that X is hard-wired and biological, not all soft and socially constructed.

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‘Neuroscience’ persuasive, even when irrelevant

Cognitive Daily, one of my favorite websites, has a great piece on a study that examined whether or not people find references to brain areas ‘lighting up’ in neuroimaging (one of my least favorite expressions) and other neuro-speak more persuasive than plain old psychology articles. The piece is titled, ‘When we see a brain “light up,” [most of] our brains shut off.’ Author Dave Munger reports that he originally found out about the research through an online article in Seed Magazine (available here) (I hope I’m not inadvertently misrepresenting anything Munger has written…). The newly published study, ‘The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,’ has appeared in the Journal of Cognitive Science (abstract here).

The study set out to find whether or not a bit of neuroscience-speak can persuade people, even when explanations are bad: ‘Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation’ (from the abstract). The crucial part of this is that, according to experts, the neuroscience in the experimental passages was irrelevant to whether or not the argument being advanced was valid or not.

Munger describes the original study as finding, not that neuroscience is always more persuasive than psychological explanation, but that neuroscience makes bad explanations more persuasive. He explains:

While there was no significant difference in the results for good explanations, people rated the bad explanations significantly better when they included irrelevant neuroscience. The team repeated the experiment on college undergraduates who were enrolled in an introductory neuroscience class, and the results were similar, both at the beginning and the end of the semester. The students actually rated all the explanations significantly better when neuroscience was included, whether or not the explanations themselves were good.

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Headline: Maternal Instinct Is Wired Into The Brain

Sometimes it’s great to see other people make all those arguments that come to mind when brain imaging research gets turned into instincts and hard wiring.  Tara Parker-Pope runs a blog On Health through The New York Times, and while I have liked some of her previous posts (that’s where I found the autism YouTube video), today she really misses the mark.  And the people commenting really let her know it!

 So here’s the quick summary.  TPP reports on imaging research with 13 mothers and their 16-month-old infants (well, toddlers, wouldn’t they be by then?).  They were then shown videos of their own babies and other babies while images were taken of their brains.  “When a woman saw images of her own child smiling or upset, her brain patterns were markedly different than when she watched the other children. There was a particularly pronounced change in brain activity when a mother was shown images of her child in distress.”

TPP then provides a winner quote from the editor of Biological Psychiatry, which published the piece last month: “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior”

First comment, from PlainJane: “This does seem to be proving the bleeding obvious… [But] what happens then to mothers who are shown NOT to have these “natural” responses in their brains to their infants? Will they be locked up as freaks or have their kids taken from them? I can just imagine.  Or will neglectful mothers be able to say “oh its biological, I can’t help not bonding with my child”?  I applaud further research into all aspects of the human brain but you and other non-scientist commentators are vital in directing HOW this is viewed. It would be nice for your blog to put it in some more context.’

Katie: “By 16 months mothers and children must be bonded, and of course the mothers would react to seeing their child in distress – for more than a year they have been reacting to their child to meet its needs… And what about moms who adopt? or use surragates?”

Mark: “I would never have suspected that mothers have a special attachment to their own children. What will they find out next?”

Marcus: “The phrasing is misleading and suggests a common but fundamental misrepresentation of what this type of fMRI research shows — or maybe a misunderstanding that confuses a general audience. “Wired,” “hard-wired,” and “instinct” suggests genetically programmed in, like a reflex. A brain pattern that shows up on fMRI studies, however, can reflect brain “programming” that has been acquired through experience, to use the computer metaphor.”

LJB: “I can’t help but feel like this research is going to be used as the crux of some defense lawyer’s argument as to why his client abandoned her child. While I’m sympathetic to post-partum issues (it took me longer than expected to bond with my son after birth) I was still fiercely protective of him and responded to him, although I was terrified of not doing it right when I went to him. I think the mother-infant bond is more complex and this is just one of the many layers of the proverbial onion.”

JiminBoulder: “Will you please stop turning us into machines?”

Jeanne, mother of five: “The absolute hilarity of the line “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior,” made my day!”

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was right… about adults

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchNature recently carried a short piece, Perception coloured by language (written by Kerri Smith), on several research papers, including one by Paul Kay at the University of California, Berkeley (well, actually, Kay is also the co-author on another of the three papers, too). The original article, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), is not openly accessible, but the abstract is here (Franklin et al. abstract). We’ve had a number of related posts on Neuroanthropology, including Daniel’s Language and Color, and my piece that the title of this one references, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?

The subject of language learning’s effect on the brain is an especially important one for a number of reasons to us at Neuroanthropology (other than our tendency to flog the occasional dead horse); not only is language a frequent surrogate for more amorphous concepts like ‘culture,’ but it is also one of the capacities that, due to the work of Chomsky, is frequently believed to have innate foundations in the brain. Chomsky’s discussion of a language function innate in all human brains provides one of the foundational texts for much broader, sweeping assertions about ‘massive modularity’ in the brain covering a wide variety of functions.

Work by Kay’s team focused on the brain hemisphere used to classify colours. They tested subjects by showing them coloured targets randomly in their visual fields, and then seeing how long subjects could shift attention to the targets. As Smith writes:

It is well known that in adults, perception of colour is processed predominantly by the left hemisphere, which is also where most people process language. Studies have shown that the language one speaks can have an impact on the colour one sees.

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Neuroimaging and Max Coltheart

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchPsyBlog has a post, “Can Cognitive Neuroscience Tell Us Anything About the Mind?” which starts out with a skeptical stance.  There is an opening feint, that scientists throw out theories about the brain and mind (and by this, we’re really talking about hypotheses).  It’s an important point, in my mind, that the focus on testing relatively small and specific hypotheses, while adding bricks and mortar to the edifice of knowledge, does little to capture the holistic nature of the mind and often runs afoul the mind-body (or brain) dichotomy.

 Basically the post then provides a quick look at some general work by Max Coltheart, Director of the Macquarie Center for Cognitive Science (Macquarie is Greg’s home institution, so just had to do that shout-out).  Coltheart has his own statement on cognitive neuropsychology on Scholarpedia (first time I’ve run across that), the peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia.

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Addiction and Our Faultlines

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchDrugs are what cause drug addiction, or so is the story we often hear in the United States.  But what if social conditions mattered as much or more in who used and abused drugs?

 Many anthropologists and other social scientists have shown that social conditions matter, including Phillippe Bourgois, Merrill Singer, and Elliott Currie.  Bourgois’ book In Search of Respect, Singer’s article Why Does Juan Garcia Have A Drinking Problem, and Currie’s Reckoning are powerful testaments to a basic point: Addiction runs along the fault lines of society.

 However, it has been relatively easy for neuroscientists to isolate themselves from that view, and to argue that drugs run along the pharmacological fault lines of the brain, generating terrible problems on their own.  Social conditions are one thing, drugs and brains are another.

 The research by Michael Nader, Morgan Drake and colleagues shows convincingly that social conditions matter, and matter a great deal, at the basic level of the brain.  This same line of research also highlights that individual differences, whether genetic or social, make a difference in addiction.  The trick is that the research is done with monkeys.

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