Blogging's First Academic Paper

In an historic achievement, I can announce that I have become (to my knowledge) the first blogger ever to publish in a peer-reviewed academic journal under a blogging pseudonym.

Skeptic, N. (2012) The Nine Circles of Scientific Hell Perspectives on Psychological Science 7 (6) 643-644

This is based on a post from two years ago (far and away the most popular post I've ever done).

Now as historic achievements go, this is fairly niche, but I do think it's important.

Most of the problems with the way science works today are problems of communication. We're trying to do 21st century work with a 19th century publishing model, and the cracks are showing.

Academic papers are a fine way of presenting the final results of research - they're here to stay. But scientists ought to be communicating (with each other and with the public) in many other ways as well, and I think that anything we can do to break down the hegemony of the 'final paper' - whether it be blogging, arxiv, the Open Science Framework or raw data sharing - is a step forward.

In that regard, I think it's great that the boundaries between 'real' papers and alternative forms of scientific communication have just become a little blurrier.

The piece appears in a special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science full to bursting with other papers that readers of this blog are likely to find interesting... and it's all free to access (at least for now).

Neuroskeptic (2012). The Nine Circles of Scientific Hell Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7 (6), 643-644 DOI: 10.1177/1745691612459519

The Persistence of "Past-Life" Memories

Many children spontaneously report memories of 'past lives'. For believers, this is evidence for reincarnation; for others, it's a psychological oddity.

But what happens when they grow up?

Icelandic psychologists Haraldsson and Abu-Izzedin looked into it. They took 28 adults, members of the Druze community of Lebanon. All of the participants had been interviewed about their past life memories by the famous reincarnationist Professor Ian Stevenson in the 70s, back when they were just 3-9 years old.

Did they still 'remember'? Most of them thought they did:

Twelve of the 28 participants are sure that they still have clear memories of their past life, and an additional 12 believe that they still have some of their childhood memories, so 86% of our sample still report some memories of a past life... one man was not sure about the source of the memories, two remembered speaking of past life memories as a child, but do not have these memories now, and one thought she might only remember something of her past life because these memories were much talked about in her family.

However - it turned out that they weren't always the same memories they'd originally reported.

As children they reported on average 30 distinct memories of past lives. As adults they could only remember 8, but of those, only half matched the ones they'd talked about previously:

This indicates that half of the statements remembered today are either fictional or distortions of the original childhood memories, or that the old lists of statements might have been incomplete.

In other words, they probably suffered from a false memory of a false memory - the mind is weird. Despite this, past lives seemed more memorable than real early-childhood:

We asked our participants what they remembered from their preschool years. We were surprised how little they remembered, and some could not remember anything. Our general impression is that past-life memories are better remembered into adult life than are normal memories from preschool years.

There was no evidence that these people suffered from any particular psychological problems as a result of their experiences, but 21% did say that overall, they preferred their past lives to their real ones.

Personally, I have a very vivid memory, not of a past life per se but rather of a very early stage in my own: I remember lying in my cot, unable to get out, rather bored, and waiting for my parents to get me up for the day.

This may really be my earliest memory, but the more I've thought about it, the less likely it seems. Could I have known what time it was, and that my parents would eventually come, when I was unable to even stand up by myself?

Maybe. But maybe it was just a later childhood dream about being a baby that seemed real. At that age, the line between dreams and reality is blurry as parents who've had to comfort a child after a nightmare will attest. I suspect this accounts for many of these 'past lives'.

Haraldsson E, and Abu-Izzedin M (2012). Persistence of "past-life" memories in adults who, in their childhood, claimed memories of a past life. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 200 (11), 985-9 PMID: 23124184

Exercise And Depression Revisited

A new study has found little evidence that aerobic exercise helps treat depression, contrary to popular belief.

Danish researchers Krogh and colleagues randomly 115 assigned depressed people to one of two exercise programs. One was a strenuous aerobic workout - cycling for 30 minutes, 3 times per week, for 3 months. The other was various stretching exercises.

The idea was that stretching was a kind of placebo control group on the grounds that, while it is an intervention, it's not the kind of exercise that gets you fit. It doesn't burn many calories, it doesn't improve your cardiovascular system, etc. Aerobic exercise is the kind that's most commonly been proposed as having an antidepressant effect.

So what happened? Not much. Both groups got less depressed but there was zero difference between the two conditions. The cyclists did get physically fitter than the stretchers, losing more weight and improving on other measures. But they didn't feel any better.

If this is true, it might mean that the antidepressant effects of aerobic exercise are psychological rather than physical - it's about the idea of 'exercising', not the process of becoming fitter.

While many trials have found modest beneficial effects of exercise vs a "control condition", the control condition was often just doing nothing much - such as being put on a waiting-list. So the placebo effect or the motivational benefits of 'doing something', rather than the effects of exercise per se, could be behind it. In the current study though the stretching avoided that problem.

As I said in a post about a previous paper, I said that Exercise and Depression: It's Complicated

The idea that exercise is a useful treatment for depression: it's got something for everyone. For doctors, it's attractive because it means they can recommend exercise - which is free, quick, and easy, at least for them - instead of spending the time and money on drugs or therapy. Governments like it for the same reason, and because it's another way of improving the nation's fitness. For people who don't like psychiatry, exercise offers a lovely alternative to psych drugs - why take those nasty antidepressants if exercise will do just as well? But this doesn't mean it's true.

This was a moderate sized study, and one study by itself doesn't prove much - any more than one single political poll does. From personal experience I think there's a good chance strenuous aerobic exercise can boost mood... but this is a reminder that the picture on exercise and depression is not quite as clear as the recent enthusiasm for it suggests...

Krogh J, Videbech P, Thomsen C, Gluud C, & Nordentoft M (2012). DEMO-II Trial. Aerobic Exercise versus Stretching Exercise in Patients with Major Depression-A Randomised Clinical Trial. PloS one, 7 (10) PMID: 23118981

John Bargh's "Transient and Ephemeral" Blogs

Leading social psychologist and Yale Professor John Bargh has been at the center of a number of controversies lately.

Most recently, researcher Brent Donnellan covered a case in which he was unable to replicate one of Bargh's experiments, which prompted Bargh to share his original raw data with him, but on the condition that he never discussed it publicly: What’s the First Rule about John Bargh’s Data? You do not talk about John Bargh’s data

But a couple of months back, even more sparks flew over an unrelated non-replication. Some other people didn't reproduce a different Bargh study.

In response to that non-replication, Bargh published two blog posts called "Nothing In Their Heads" and "Angry Birds", criticizing both the study itself and the journal it appeared in, PLoS ONE. It was a combative defence of his work.

However, Bargh seems to have since decided it was a bit too defensive, because the posts have been deleted. They just vanished: to my knowledge Bargh hasn't announced this, nor explained why.

Now interestingly enough, Bargh has just published a short paper in which he offers he thoughts on blogging - it's rather topical...

Debate among psychologists takes place formally in the published record of journal articles and books... this is the permanent record, as opposed to the relatively transient and ephemeral world of blogs.

As I understand (and use) them, blogs are like newspaper columns or spontaneous radio interviews, and meant to be a forum wherein one can provide the interested public with opinions, feelings, and conjectures; blogs are thus a potentially valuable outlet for ideas when used and evaluated appropriately...

[but they are] personal property whereas journal articles are public property
– as illustrated by one’s ability to edit, change, or delete one’s personal blog entries and one’s concomitant inability to do the same with published works (except to make necessary corrections with the consent of the journal editor).

Fair enough. However, the fact is, a public statement is a public statement. You can change your mind, but you can't change the past. In my book, to try to erase your past statements from the record is both deceptive - and counterproductive.

The internet never forgets... well, actually, I can't find copies of the deleted posts (Edit: See the comments, someone has saved them), so maybe it does, however there are dozens of references to them online, many highly critical. At best, what Bargh has achieved is that his critics are now the only sources for information about his work.

Bargh's new paper, by the way, is a response to this piece I blogged about about the question of free will.

Bargh, J. (2012). Social psychology cares about causal conscious thought, not free will per se British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjso.12011

Autism Brain Scans Flawed? You Read It Here First

According to a piece in Nature today, a major line of research about autism might be seriously flawed:

One of the most popular and widely accepted theories on the cause of autism spectrum disorders attributes the condition to disrupted connectivity between different regions of the brain.

This 'connectivity hypothesis' claims that the social and cognitive abnormalities in people with autism can be explained by a dearth of connections between distant regions of the brain. Some flavours of this theory also predict more connections between nearby brain regions.

Recent studies, however, have found that when a person moves their head while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - a method that maps how different neuroanatomical structures of the brain interact in real time, its functional connectivity - it looks like the neural activity observed in autism. That's a sobering discovery...

So the characteristic pattern of "abnormal connectivity" in autism might not be real: it might just reflect the fact that people with autism move around more during the scan.

A sobering idea, indeed... but not an entirely new one. I suggested it over a year ago:

Head motion affects estimates of functional connectivity. The more motion, the weaker the measured connectivity in long-range networks, while shorter range connections were stronger... Disconcertingly, this is exactly what's been proposed to happen in autism (although in fairness, not all the evidence for this comes from fMRI). This clearly doesn't prove that the autism studies are all dodgy, but it's an issue. People with autism, and people with almost any mental or physical disorder, on average tend to move more than healthy controls.

Ben Deen, and Kevin Pelphrey (2012). Perspective: Brain scans need a rethink Nature