After four years, Neuroskeptic is no longer an indie blog - I've moved to Discover Magazine blogs.
The new address is here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/
So please stop using this blogspot site; don't link to it, don't visit it, etc. All the posts are on the new one. The new RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/neuro-skeptic/
Comments on this blog are now turned off but all old comments have been transferred to the new site, and you can comment there.
Neuroskeptic
...has moved to http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/
Thursday, 21 February 2013
Saturday, 9 February 2013
Neuroskeptic Is Moving
Over the next few days, Neuroskeptic will be moving to Discover Magazine. Which is very exciting.
This will mean no new posts for at least a week, while we sort out the technical issues of the transition, and I've also turned comments off - all existing comments will be moved over to the new blog, however.
For more updates you can follow me on Twitter...
See you on the other side soon!
This will mean no new posts for at least a week, while we sort out the technical issues of the transition, and I've also turned comments off - all existing comments will be moved over to the new blog, however.
For more updates you can follow me on Twitter...
See you on the other side soon!
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
Still 'Profiteering From Anxiety'
Late last year, the excellent Neurobonkers blog covered a case of 'Profiteering from anxiety'.
It seems one Nader Amir has applied for a patent on the psychological technique of 'Attentional Retraining', a method designed to treat anxiety and other emotional problems by conditioning the mind to unconsciously pay more attention to positive things and ignore unpleasant stuff.
For just $139.99, you can have a crack at modifying your unconscious with the help of Amir's Cognitive Retraining Technologies.
It's a clever idea... but hardly a new one. As Neurobonkers said, research on these kinds of methods had been going on for years before Amir came on the scene. In a comment, Prof. Colin MacLeod (who's been researching this stuff for over 20 years) argued that "I do not believe that a US patent granted to Prof Amir for the attentional bias modification approach would withstand challenge."
Well, in an interesting turn of events, Amir has issued just Corrections (1,2) to two of his papers. Both of the articles reported that retraining was an effective treatment for anxiety; but in both cases he now reveals that there was
an error...in the article a disclosure should have been noted that Nader Amir is the co-founder of a company that markets anxiety relief products.Omitting to declare a conflict of interest... how unfortunate.
Still, it's an easy mistake to make: when you're focused on doing unbiased, objective, original research, as Amir doubtless was, such mundane matters are the last thing you tend to pay attention to.
Amir, N., Taylor, C., and Donohue, M. (2013). Correction to Amir et al. (2011). Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 81 (1), 112-112 DOI: 10.1037/a0031157
Sunday, 3 February 2013
Unilaterally Raising the Scientific Standard
For years, I and others have been arguing that the current system of publishing science is broken. Publishing and peer-reviewing work only after the study's been conducted and the data analysed allows bad practices - such as selective publication of desirable findings, and running multiple statistical tests to find positive results - to run rampant.
So I was extremely interested when I received an email from Jona Sassenhagen, of the University of Marburg, with subject line: Unilaterally raising the standard.
Sassenhagen explained that he's chose to pre-register a neuroscience study on a public database, the German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS).
His project, Alignment of Late Positive ERP Components to Linguistic Deviations ("P600"), is designed to use EEG to test whether the brain generates a distinct electrical response - the P600 - in response to seeing grammatical errors. The background here is that the P600 certainly exists, but people disagree on whether it's specific to language; Sassenhagen hopes to find out.
By publicly announcing the methods he'll use before collecting any data, Sassenhagen has, in my view, taken a brave and important step towards a better kind of science.
Already, most journals require trials of medical treatments to be publicly pre-registered, and the DRKS is one such registry. This study, however, is 'pure' neuroscience with nothing clinical about it, so it doesn't need to be registered - Sassenhagen just did it voluntarily.
Further, I should point out that he offered to pre-register his data analysis pipeline too by sending it to me. Unfortunately, I didn't reply to the email in time... but that was purely my fault.
I very much hope and expect that others will follow in his footsteps. Unilaterally adopting preregistration is one of the ways that I've argued reform could get started. As I said:
I don't know if this is the first time anyone's opted in to registering a pure neuroscience study, but it's certainly the first case I know of it being done for an entirely new experiment.
There have, however, recently been many pre-registered attempts to replicate previously published results e.g. the Reproducibility of Psychological Science; the 'Precognition' Replications; and an upcoming special issue of Frontiers in Cognition.
Replications are good, registered ones doubly so - but they're not enough to fix bad practice on their own. To do that we need to work on the source, original scientific research.
So I was extremely interested when I received an email from Jona Sassenhagen, of the University of Marburg, with subject line: Unilaterally raising the standard.
Sassenhagen explained that he's chose to pre-register a neuroscience study on a public database, the German Clinical Trials Register (DRKS).
His project, Alignment of Late Positive ERP Components to Linguistic Deviations ("P600"), is designed to use EEG to test whether the brain generates a distinct electrical response - the P600 - in response to seeing grammatical errors. The background here is that the P600 certainly exists, but people disagree on whether it's specific to language; Sassenhagen hopes to find out.
By publicly announcing the methods he'll use before collecting any data, Sassenhagen has, in my view, taken a brave and important step towards a better kind of science.
Already, most journals require trials of medical treatments to be publicly pre-registered, and the DRKS is one such registry. This study, however, is 'pure' neuroscience with nothing clinical about it, so it doesn't need to be registered - Sassenhagen just did it voluntarily.
Further, I should point out that he offered to pre-register his data analysis pipeline too by sending it to me. Unfortunately, I didn't reply to the email in time... but that was purely my fault.
I very much hope and expect that others will follow in his footsteps. Unilaterally adopting preregistration is one of the ways that I've argued reform could get started. As I said:
This would, at least at first, place these adopters at an objective disadvantage. However, by voluntarily accepting such a disadvantage, it might be hoped that such actors would gain acclaim as more trustworthy than non-adopters.Pre-registration puts you at a disadvantage - insofar as it limits your ability to use bad practice to fish for positive results. It means you can't cheat, essentially, which is a handicap if everyone else can.
I don't know if this is the first time anyone's opted in to registering a pure neuroscience study, but it's certainly the first case I know of it being done for an entirely new experiment.
There have, however, recently been many pre-registered attempts to replicate previously published results e.g. the Reproducibility of Psychological Science; the 'Precognition' Replications; and an upcoming special issue of Frontiers in Cognition.
Replications are good, registered ones doubly so - but they're not enough to fix bad practice on their own. To do that we need to work on the source, original scientific research.
Thursday, 31 January 2013
Language That Is Person-First
An editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by Roger Collier highlights the problem of Person-first language: Laudable cause, horrible prose
Person-first language (or language that is person-first, as it prefers to be known) is the nice idea that rather than calling someone, say, "blind", we should call them "a person who is blind", so as to remind everyone that they're not defined by their blindness but are a person first... clever, eh?
No. For one thing, it's just bad English. As Collier puts it: "There’s a reason Ernest Hemingway didn’t call his novel The Person Who Was Male and Advanced in Years and the Sea."
He goes on to quote linguist Helena Halmari who highlights a number of problems with the approach:
To me that's the really troubling part of this: the should aspect. The only reason you should not call someone something, is because they ask you not to.
Person-first advocates claim to be speaking on behalf of the 'group' who are harmed and offended by the current use of language - but who gave them that right? They don't speak for me, or anyone but themselves. I don't see 'the mentally ill' as a group at all, but even if it is one, they're certainly not our elected representatives.
So non-person-first language doesn't offend me. In fact, I'm more worried by the idea that people will assume that, because I'm mentally ill, I want them to use person-first language. Now that's offensive.
Person-first language (or language that is person-first, as it prefers to be known) is the nice idea that rather than calling someone, say, "blind", we should call them "a person who is blind", so as to remind everyone that they're not defined by their blindness but are a person first... clever, eh?
No. For one thing, it's just bad English. As Collier puts it: "There’s a reason Ernest Hemingway didn’t call his novel The Person Who Was Male and Advanced in Years and the Sea."
He goes on to quote linguist Helena Halmari who highlights a number of problems with the approach:
In English, emphasis naturally occurs at the end of sentences... so by pushing mention of a disability or disease deeper into a sentence, adherents to person-first language may actually be adding stress to those words. “What you have at the end of a sentence is the new information that gets the most attention,” says Halmari.Worse yet...
Tucking the disability behind the noun may contribute to stigma rather than reduce it. After all, most adjectives with positive connotations precede nouns. We do not typically say a “person who is beautiful,” for instance, or a “person who is intelligent.” Sticking a word in the shadow of a noun can create the impression that there is something inherently wrong with it - that it should be hidden.As a 'person with mental illness', I entirely agree. I am a man, a neuroscientist, a blogger; I'm not ashamed of those things, so I don't feel the need to erect linguistic fences between them and my person. I am also a psychiatric patient, a depressive, mentally ill; I'm not ashamed of that, either, and I resent the implication - however well-intentioned - that I should.
To me that's the really troubling part of this: the should aspect. The only reason you should not call someone something, is because they ask you not to.
Person-first advocates claim to be speaking on behalf of the 'group' who are harmed and offended by the current use of language - but who gave them that right? They don't speak for me, or anyone but themselves. I don't see 'the mentally ill' as a group at all, but even if it is one, they're certainly not our elected representatives.
So non-person-first language doesn't offend me. In fact, I'm more worried by the idea that people will assume that, because I'm mentally ill, I want them to use person-first language. Now that's offensive.
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