Drunk Rats Could Overturn Neurological Orthodoxy

A form of brain abnormality long regarded as permanent is, in fact, sometimes reversible, according to an unassuming little paper with big implications.

Here's the key data: some rats were given a lot of alcohol for four days (the "binge"), and then allowed to sober up for a week. Before, during and after their rodent Spring Break, they had brain scans. And these revealed something remarkable - the size of the rats' lateral ventricles increased during the binge, but later returned to normal.

Control rats, given lots of sugar instead of alcohol, did not show these changes.

This is really pretty surprising. The ventricles are simply fluid-filled holes in the brain. Increased ventricular size is generally regarded as a sign that the brain is shrinking - less brain, bigger holes - and if the brain is shrinking that must be because cells are dying or at least getting smaller. So bigger ventricles is bad.

Or so we thought... but this study shows that it might not always be true: alcohol reversibly increases ventricular volume over a timescale of days. It does so, the authors say, essentially by drying brain tissue out; like most things, if you dry the brain out, it gets smaller (and the ventricles get bigger) but when the water comes back to the tissues, it expands again.

As you can see here in Figure 2...

Maybe. I admit that just eyeballing this, it looks more like the ventricles are getting brighter, rather than bigger, but I'm not familiar with the details of water scanning. Maybe some readers will know more about it.

If it's true, this is big - maybe it's not just high doses of alcohol that does this. Maybe other drugs or factors can shrink or expand, the ventricles, or even other areas, purely by acting on tissue water regulation, rather than by anything more 'interesting'.

Take the various claims that some psychiatric drugs boost brain volume while others decrease it, just for starters...could they be headed for a watery grave?

Of course, this is in mice - and it might not translate to humans... we need to find out, and I for one am keen to apply for a grant. Here's my draft:

Participants: 8 healthy-livered neuroscientists.
Materials: 1 MRI scanner, 1 crate Jack Daniels.
Methods: Subjects will confer to pick a Designated Operator, who will remain sober. If no volunteers for this role are forthcoming, selection will be randomized by Bottle Spinning. All other participants will consume Jack Daniels ad libitum, and take turns being scanned. Once all Jack Daniels is depleted, participants will continue to be scanned until fully sobered up (defined as when they can successfully spell "amygdalohippocampal").
Instructions to Participants: i) what happens in the magnet, stays in the magnet. ii) If you 'dirty' the scanner, you clean it up. iii) Bottle caps are not MRI safe!

Er... seriously though, someone should check.

Zahr NM, Mayer D, Rohlfing T, Orduna J, Luong R, Sullivan EV, and Pfefferbaum A (2013). A mechanism of rapidly reversible cerebral ventricular enlargement independent of tissue atrophy. Neuropsychopharmacology  PMID: 23306181

My Breakfast With "Scientism"

One morning, I awoke convinced that science was the only source of knowledge. I had developed a case of spontaneous scientism.

The first challenge I faced was deciding what to eat for breakfast. Muesli, or cornflakes? Which would be the more scientific choice? I decided to go on the internet to look up the nutritional value of the different cereals, to see which one would be healthiest.

My computer was off. So first I'd need to turn it on - but how? From past experience, I suspected that pressing the big green power button on the front would do it - but then I remembered, that's merely anecdotal evidence. I needed scientific proof.

So I made a mental note to run a double-blind, randomized controlled trial of "turning my computer on" tomorrow.

Lacking nutritional data, I decided to pick a cereal by taste. I like muesli more than cornflakes. At last, a choice! Muesli it is, I thought - until I realized that I didn't actually know which one I preferred more. I had a gut feeling I liked muesli, but that's not science. What if, in fact, I hated muesli? Science couldn't tell me, at least not yet.

Another mental note: conduct cereal taste preference study, day after tomorrow. No breakfast for me, today.

By now, I was hungry, confused and annoyed. "This is getting ridiculous!", I tried to exclaim to no-one in particular - but then I realized - I could not even speak because I knew next to nothing scientific about the English language.

Sure, I had vague intuitions about how to put words together to express meaning, but that's just unscientific hearsay that I'd picked up as a child (no better than a religion, really!) In order to communicate, I'd need to study some proper science about semantics and grammar... but, oh no, how could I even read that literature?

Faced with the impossibility of doing anything whatsoever purely guided by science, I decided to go back to bed... yet with no scientific basis for controlling my own muscles, I collapsed where I stood, bashing my head on the breakfast table as I fell. 

Luckily, the bump on the noggin cured me of my strange obsession, and I lived to tell the tale.

---

Many people will tell you that "scientism", the belief that science is the only way to know anything, is a serious problem, a misunderstanding that threatens all kinds of nasty consequences.

It's not, because it doesn't exist - no-one believes that. If they did, they would end up like the unfortunate narrator in my story.

Everyday, we make use of many sources of information, from personal experience and learning to simply looking at things, whether they be right in front of your eyes or on TV. This is knowledge, and no-one thinks that we ought to replace it with "science", if that were even possible.

"Scientism" is a fundamentally unhelpful concept. Scientists are often wrong, and sometimes they're wrong about things that other non-scientists are right about. But each such case is different and must be judged on its own merits.

The Onion Makes Mental Illness Ridiculous

Despite being entirely fictional, The Onion offer some of the most perceptive political analysis anywhere.

Less well known, but likewise brilliant, is its coverage of mental health. The Onion's approach is to satirize the beliefs and perceptions that characterize psychiatric illness. The result is hilarious, but also insightful and, in a weird way, empathetic:

Local Anorexic Still Way Too Fat

Despite years of intense dieting and vigorous exercise, local anorexic Lisa Kimmel is still way too fat, it was reported Monday... Though Kimmel could stand to lose a few pounds in nearly every area of her body, worst of all are her arms. "I've got this totally disgusting flab on the back of my arms that swings back and forth when I move," said Kimmel, wearing an oversized Champion sweatshirt to conceal her obesity. "My arms totally look like my grandmother's."

Making matters worse is the fact that Kimmel's mother wants her to be overweight, constantly trying to get her to eat fatty foods like ravioli, mashed potatoes and broiled chicken with the skin still on. Other family members, as well as Kimmel's friends and doctors, also entreat her to eat because they want her to be fat, repulsive and unliked.

Pharmaceutical Company Says Its New Anti-Depressant Is 'Worthless And Dumb'

At a press conference Monday, Peter Cafazzo, CEO of Brunley-Hunt Pharmaceuticals (BHP), introduced his company's latest anti-depressant, Cyntrex, a product he described as "a totally stupid waste of time that probably nobody will ever want ever." ...

According to reports, top BHP researchers began having doubts about the drug during the early development stages, when they realized they couldn't do anything right ever ever ever, and that none of the pharmaceutical-industry leaders cared whether they lived or died. But work on the project continued, despite BHP's growing conviction that Cyntrex would be the worst product in pharmaceutical history.

Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough?

Panelists discuss ways to care for the nation's paranoid schizophrenics, such as hiding cameras in their homes or audio transmitters in their ears. e.g. "We need to hide cameras everywhere they go, in the street, in their homes, in the eyes of people at the stores where they shop."

Some people might see this as making fun of the mentally ill, but I don't: it's making fun of the illness.

Suffering from a psychiatric disorder is a tragedy, but the disorder itself, and the distorted cognitions associated with it are, well, ridiculous. It's ridiculous to see yourself as fat when you're dangerously underweight. It's laughable to think you're worthless when you're successful and respected.

Coming to realize the absurdity of such beliefs is an important part of recovery, and an explicit goal of cognitive behavioural therapy although therapists don't tend to emphasize the funny side, it is certainly there.

Best. Experiment. Ever.

Studies have shown that men's testosterone levels increase after sexual stimulation. However, other research shows that merely briefly chatting to a woman also causes testosterone release, making it unclear whether sex, per se, is associated with testosterone changes.

So an intrepid band of researchers decided to find out using a unique methodology. Their paper's called Salivary Testosterone Levels in Men at a U.S. Sex Club and it's about... that.

They first set the scene:

Subjects were recruited from an internationally known "adult social club" in Las Vegas, Nevada, also referred to as a "sex club"... patrons pay a membership fee (akin to an entrance fee) to enter the 18,000 square foot, 2-story club. The first floor is open to all paying customers. The second VIP floor is available for an additional fee and includes a variety of rooms, including fetish rooms...

All are not created equal in this Garden of Eden, however:

Personal observation and communication with staff and members revealed to the investigators that there is a semi-structured hierarchy of patrons in the club. Single men (also referred to as ‘‘sharks’’) are easily identified by an orange wristband. Single women also wear an orange wrist band. Couples are identified by a green colored wristband. Single men are often considered to be a nuisance, as reported by many patrons, and are avoided in certain circumstances. Single women, moderately rare, do not share the stigma.

Anyway, the authors went there and recruited 44 men, of whom 18 ended up having sex, while 26 only looked at other patrons doing so. Saliva samples were taken before and afterwards, and levels of testosterone were measured. The results showed that testosterone increases were much larger in the do-ers than the watchers (see above).

This is an important result, the authors say, because

it runs against the grain of previous human testosterone and sexual stimuli studies in which testosterone increases in response to erotic videos and "courtship"’ behavioral interactions appeared more reliably induced than those related to active sexual behavior... We suggest that the reason for our findings, in contrast to the overarching pattern of previous work, is that lab-based paradigms may quell men’s testosterone responses... engaging in sexual behavior while wired up to machines in a sterile lab may put a damper on men’s arousal and physiological responses.

A good point.

In general, lab studies can be misleading when the behaviors under investigation are the kind of thing you can't really do in a lab. For research on fairly 'basic' memory, perception and cognitive tasks, a lab is probably as good an environment as any but for more complex behaviours it may be systematically misleading. And if a lab is bad, an MRI scanner is even less realistic.

Now, I thought the neuroscientists who threw a cocktail party on their grant money had it good, but these authors really hit a home run by using theirs to get into a sex club. It would be hard to top that but I note that surprisingly little is known about the, er, physiological correlates of lying on a beach in the Bahamas atop a pile of gold bars and bottles of Dom Pérignon. Someone needs to find out and I for one would be willing to undertake this challenge.

 Escasa, M., Casey, J., and Gray, P. (2010). Salivary Testosterone Levels in Men at a U.S. Sex Club Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40 (5), 921-926 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-010-9711-3

Upcoming Appearances (And A Funny Picture)

Just a quick reminder - or perhaps a new announcement for those of you who aren't on Twitter - that I've been short-listed for the UK Science Blogging Prize. I'll be giving a very brief talk at the awards night next Sunday 25th November which is in the Penderel's Oak, London.

Speaking of Twitter, I'm on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/Neuro_Skeptic

I'll also be speaking in Philadelphia on December 6th at UPenn on the topic of Brain Rumors: Public (MIs)understanding of Neuroscience and Why It Matters

Finally, to save this from being a completely boring post, here is the cover of the latest British Medical Journal, which in my opinion is the funniest image ever to grace the front of an academic publication. Even if it is, literally, potty humour.

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 Rise of Science Spam

I'm not sure if it's just me, but in the past few months I've been getting an inordinate amount of scientific spam.

This is at my real-world email address, under the name I publish my papers. I can only think that some nefarious hucksters are trawling scientific journals and harvesting contact details from the author lists. Either that, or a legitimate organization I've signed up to has shared their mailing list; but a robot seems more likely.

Whatever's going on, it's getting worse, at least for me. A few months ago, I got maybe one piece of sci-spam a week, which was tolerable. Now it's up to half a dozen or more per week and getting ridiculous. Here's what I've got just in the past 10 days.

Lab Products

These I can kind of see the point of: if you have a product to sell, you want to advertise it to people who might want to buy it. The problem is that as someone who scans brains, and last touched a pipette about 8 years ago, I really don't want to buy:

Two readouts for the price of one - Calcium and Arrestin. Select Any Gq-Coupled Calcium Cell Line and Save! Special Fall Savings!

Nor am I interested in:

Dear Colleague, Through your publications, we have noted that our Catalase antibody (GTX110704) may be useful to your current work. Catalase is a peroxisomal enzyme that converts hydrogen peroxide to oxygen and water, making it a key feature of the cell’s defense against oxidative stress...

To be honest, if you need to be told what catalase is, you're unlikely to want to buy a product that will let you measure it... but that's just my opinion, and I'm not a spammer.

Conferences

This is where it gets weird. Spam inviting people to conferences, doesn't make sense, because by definition, if a conference is resorting to spam to get attendees, it's not very good. Respected conferences are often oversubscribed; the whole point about a conference is that people want to be there, because other interesting people are expected to be there. Reputation is everything.

 Here's a few I've been offered in the past two weeks:

31 October 2012 is the deadline to save on registration for APAL 2012. Covering current and specialty aspects of mental health, this is one gathering that you cannot afford to miss! ... Please note that payment can be made by credit card.

and...

1st International Conference on Cultural Psychiatry in Mediterranean Countries, Tel Aviv, Israel | 5-7 November, 2012 The countdown has begun: Less than 2 months to WPA-TPS in Tel Aviv.

and...

Dear colleague, I welcome you to our first international conference on the topic of Integrated psychiatry and clinical psychology as our valued guest speaker. Because of your publication profile, we invite you to present ideas related to your works on related to the topic of the conference. Psychiatry and clinical psychology branches have evolved rapidly in past couple of decades. So much so that several sub-branches have emerged as parts of these sciences. The theme of present conference is integrated psychiatry and clinical psychology...

Journals

If you are resorting to spam to get to people to write for your journal, I don't ever want to read it and will never cite anything published in it.

Even if you were only angling for readers, I'd be suspicious of your integrity, but to spam for people to submit to you is absurd. Even mediocre journals nowadays get far more submissions than they can ever print. So if your journal isn't even mediocre enough to attract people then you have a real problem.

Journal of Anesthesiology and Clinical Science (ISSN 2049-9752)

Journal of Anesthesialogy [sic] & Clinical Science is an Open Access and peer reviewed Journal which aims to publish top quality papers on administration of anaesthesia during surgeries and pain management etc. The Journal has well [sic] established Editorial Board and follows rigorous peer review for all the [sic] manuscript's [sic]. visit [sic] the Journal to find latest [sic] articles published... We invite you to submit your research work/paper for the Anesthesialogy and Clinical Science Journal...

Oh, and you also have a problem if you can't spell your own journal title nor write coherent English despite claiming to only accept high quality scientific papers in that language.

Has anyone else noticed a surge of this kind of thing recently?

Control A Robot With Your Brain?

A paper just out makes the dramatic claim that you can control a robot using thought alone, Avatar style, thanks to a 'mind reading' MRI scanner. But does it really work?

Dutch neuroscientists Patrik Andersson and colleagues bought a robot - an off-the-shelf toy called the 'Spykee' -  which is equipped with Wifi and  a video camera. The controlling human lay in the scanner and real-time fMRI was used to record brain activity. The video feed from the robot was showed on a screen in the scanner, completing the human-robot loop.

Participants controlled the robot with their brain. Specifically, they had to focus their attention on one of three arrows - forward, left, and right - shown on the screen.

During an initial training phase they focussed on each arrow in turn, to provide examples of the resulting brain activity: these were then fed into a machine learning algorithm that learned to recognize the pattern of BOLD activation for each command. Then in the second phase, they could control the robot just by thinking about the correct arrow - the scanner 'decoded' their brain activity and sent the appropriate commands to the bot over Wifi.

None of the elements of this process are new - real time fMRI has been around for a few years, so has machine learning to decode brain activation - but it's the first time they've been put together in this way.

And it's pretty awesome. The participants were able to guide their 'avatar' around a room to visit a number of target locations. They weren't perfectly accurate, and it took 10 or 15 minutes to navigate a few meters of ground... but it worked.

However... were they really using their minds, or just their eyes?

This is my main concern about this paper: participants were told to keep their eyes focussed on the middle of the screen and just mentally focus on the arrows to give commands. If they did indeed keep their eyes entirely stationary, then the patterns of brain activation would indeed represent pure 'thoughts'.

But if they were moving their eyes slightly (even unconsciously), the interpretation would be rather different. Moving their eyes would change the pattern of light hitting their retina, and this would be expected to change brain activation in the visual system of the brain.

So, maybe the fancy fMRI decoding system wasn't reading their mind, it was just acting as an elaborate means of tracking eye movements - which would be much less interesting. If you want to control a robot with your eyes, there are cheaper ways.

Andersson et al acknowledge this issue, and they claim, for various reasons, that this probably wasn't what happened here - but they didn't measure eye movements directly, so it does remain a worry. Eye tracking devices suitable for fMRI are widely available but this study used an ultra-powerful 7 Tesla scanner which, the authors say, made it impossible. So there's more work to be done here.

Andersson P, Pluim JP, Viergever MA, and Ramsey NF (2012). Navigation of a Telepresence Robot via Covert Visuospatial Attention and Real-Time fMRI. Brain topography PMID: 22965825

Cocktail-Party Neuroscience

"That's all very well, but what about the real world?"

This, or something to this effect, is a stock criticism of much of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Studies of human behavior and brain function under carefully controlled laboratory conditions don't tell us much about everyday life, the argument goes.

It's a serious point. But a group of neuroscientists have now sought to dispel such worries in rather spectacular fashion. With the help of some nifty wireless headsets, Alan Gevins and colleagues of San Francisco took electroencephalography (EEG) out of the lab and organized an EEG party - allowing them to record brain electrical activity from 10 people as they chatted and drank vodka martinis. An electroencephalorgy one might say.

This is perhaps the only time in history that scientists have admitted, on record, to getting drunk with their research funding.

Pics or it didn't happen? They have pics:

And more:

The odd device held by the girl in blue is an alcohol breathalyser, which brings us onto the purpose of the study, which was to measure the effect of alcohol on brain activity.

The authors first measured the effect of alcohol on brain alpha, beta and theta band activity under standard lab conditions, and then checked to see if the results translated to the party. They did, surprisingly well in fact (although the whole thing relied on a multivariate model of the kind that make purists suspicious.)

Still, only 40% of the party data was deemed unusable due to electrical artifacts caused by participants speaking, swallowing, chewing and so forth, which is pretty good, and suggests that real-world EEG could be much more feasible than many neuroscientists would have predicted (given how annoying these sources of noise can be even under lab conditions I'd have guessed it would be more like 90%).

Now I'll make an admission: when I first read this paper, I was cynical. I felt sure it was some kind of advert for the authors' products, probably the nifty wireless EEG caps they used. "Oh very clever," I thought. "You run a wacky study, it goes viral, and you get free advertising. Well, it's worked on me, but I'm going to call you out on it."

However, the authors were one step ahead, because the paper assures readers that:

The authors are employed by the San Francisco Brain Research Institute and SAM Technology which are 100% supported by competing research grants from the U.S. Federal Government... The organization only performs research and offers no services or products. None of the authors perform consulting work. It is very unlikely that any corporation, investor, etc. would find it commercially worthwhile to buy or license the technologies that the authors have made to do their research.

OK then.

Gevins A, Chan CS, and Sam-Vargas L (2012). Towards measuring brain function on groups of people in the real world. PloS one, 7 (9) PMID: 22957099

Neuroscience: Solving The Hard-On Problem

Take a good look at this, fellas:

It might not look like much, but this is science's very first glimpse of something rather close to the hearts of most men.

These images show nerve activation in the spinal cord during sexual arousal. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), best known as a way of recording brain activity, applied to the spine, Canadian researchers Kozyrev et al were able to record the changes associated with, well, stimulation. Here's the paper: Neural correlates of sexual arousal in the spinal cords of able-bodied men.

The methods sound like a real riot. Ten guys were scanned while being exposed to two different kinds of stimulation. First, 'audiovisual'

Films, depicting heterosexual couples engaged in sex play, vaginal sexual intercourse, and oral sex, were presented in two 5-min blocks, separated by a baseline condition (blank screen) for 3 min... The selected films were chosen by the investigators and were all very highly rated (on a scale of 1 to 10) by independent viewers. Only films that received a minimum score of 8 out of 10 were shown to participants.

They don't say who these independent grumble-rating viewers were, but I'm, er, told that some porn sites these days have user ratings next to each clip. So it's possible that they used those and that the raters were, quite literally, just some bunch of wankers.

As for the manual stimulation...

All participants manually performed stimulation of the penis. Participants received written instructions superimposed onto a rear-projection screen, indicating whether to rest or to perform penile self-stimulation... there were two equal blocks of 1.5 min of stimulation that were separated by a 1.5-min block of rest... a shorter duration was selected for this part of the study in order to avoid overstimulation of the penis and/or ejaculation.

Good thinking. That could have been messy.

The results of the study largely confirmed previous work, but it's an important step forward because until now, no-one had measured arousal-related spinal activation directly in healthy humans; the evidence came from recordings in animals and spinal injury patients.

Clearly there's more work to be done here. The images are rather crude. That grey oval is meant to look like this:

Still, it's early days. Spinal cord fMRI is not a new technique, having first been performed in 1999, but it's not received nearly as much research interest as the brain variety.

Kozyrev N, Figley CR, Alexander MS, Richards JS, Bosma RL, & Stroman PW (2012). Neural correlates of sexual arousal in the spinal cords of able-bodied men: a spinal FMRI investigation. Journal of sex & marital therapy, 38 (5), 418-35 PMID: 22900624

On Twitter, It's Beer Before Liquor

People tweet about beer in the evenings, especially on Fridays, according to a not-very-surprising-but-still-fun little report in the journal Epidemiology: Using Twitter to Measure Behavior Patterns

The study used timeu.se, a free searchable database of millions of Tweets. The site grew out of an excellent bit of research you might remember from last year that examined how average mood varies over the course of the day and year.

People tweet about and presumably drink beer (and wine) most in the evenings, especially on Fridays and Saturdays. Smoking-related tweets however were mostly flat, although there did seem to be a small peak in the mornings.

So I ran a few searches of my own, and I noticed that different drinks peak at different times. "Beer" is most popular in the early evening, closely followed by "Wine", but "Vodka" doesn't max out until midnight.

Looks like people are not following the old "beer before liquor, never sicker" rule.

Also, while wine gets the most tweets during the week, beer and vodka really take off at the weekend.

 Cunningham A. John (2012). Using Twitter to Measure Behavior Patterns Epidemiology DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e3182625e5d

Search Trends Reveal Sexual Seasons

Americans are most likely to search for sex online during the early summer and the winter, according to research just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The authors looked at the Google Trends for a selection of naughty words and phrases, and this revealed a pretty marked 6 month cycle for searches originating from the USA, with two yearly peaks in the search volumes. There was no such pattern for some non-sexual control words.

Here's the graph for pornography searches, with an idealized 6 month cycle also shown for comparison. The data were similar for two other categories of sexual words: prostitution and dating websites. Overall the results seem solid, although in studies like this, I always worry a bit about how the included search terms were chosen; there is a potential for cherry picking (no pun intended).

Those words in full:

The pornography keyword set included 10 keywords used in previous research that individuals tend to use when searching for pornography (‘‘porn,’’ ‘‘boobs,’’ ‘‘xvideos,’’ ‘‘tits,’’‘‘sex,’’ ‘‘pussy,’’ ‘‘hentai,’’ ‘‘xxx,’’ ‘‘nude,’’ and ‘‘milf’’).

In a similar manner, the prostitution keyword set included five keywords that individuals might use to engage in sexual activities that are often illegal (‘‘call girl,’’ ‘‘escort,’’ ‘‘massage parlor,’’ ‘‘brothel,’’ and ‘‘prostitute’’).

Finally, the mate-seeking keyword set included the names of 10 popular websites that individuals often use to find potential mates (‘‘eHarmony,’’ ‘‘Yahoo Personals’’, ‘‘AOL Personals,’’ ‘‘Plenty of Fish,’’ ‘‘Zoosk,’’ ‘‘Singles Net’’ ‘‘Friend Finder,’’ ‘‘JDate,’’ ‘‘Match.com,’’ and ‘‘Okcupid’’).

Heh. I'm not sure I should be quoting those, it might attract some weird traffic to the blog. But oh well.

The authors note that a six-month sexual cycle has been reported before. It crops up in everything from abortion rates, to condom sales, and diagnosis of sexually transmitted infections. But why?

One possibility is that it's purely a social construction driven by the fact that in Western cultures, Christmas and summer are the main holiday seasons; but it could reflect a more primitive biological cycle. Google ought to offer a way to find that out, actually; find a country with a similar climate to the USA, but with different major holidays. China, maybe?

Markey PM, and Markey CN (2012). Seasonal Variation in Internet Keyword Searches: A Proxy Assessment of Sex Mating Behaviors. Archives of sexual behavior PMID: 22810997

Starkey vs. Penny - Transcript

The British Twittersphere has been enlivened today by the release of a video showing the 'heated' debate between historian David Starkey and journalist Laurie Penny during a discussion on the English national identity.

Some clips are available on YouTube, but the full video is behind a paywall, so I thought I'd write up the transcript for anyone who's interested.

Personally I think any attempt to define a national (or other) 'identity' can only undermine that identity, just as analyzing a joke renders it unfunny. Identities, like humour, stop making sense when you try to make sense of them; there is nothing rational about them, and to debate them rationally is impossible - this exchange is English in a way that no amount of sensible arguments could be.

Laurie Penny at podium.

LP: “But what’s interesting about the question what is Britishness, is precisely the fact that nobody seems to know. It’s gold for a columnist, it’s gold for any hack, and, you’ve seen 4 people on this panel are probably going to give completely different answers, anybody you ask in this audience is going to give a different answer.

If you ask David Cameron, it’s about tolerance and fairness and inviting French people to take advantage of our lenient tax system; if you ask a pupil at Wellington college, growing up in these lovely surroundings, they’ll tell you, probably about the excellent teaching here, but they’ll also tell you about grime and dubstep and whatever it is they’re listening to; if you ask me, and I’ve been recently been living in America for a while, so, I get asked this question quite a lot, and I bring up things like, the taste of fish and chips on Brighton Beach, and Dr Who, and drinking tea. That’s what it is for me.

If you ask somebody like my colleague Prof. Starkey, it’s playing xenophobia and racial prejudice for laughs, and if you ask people who organize conferences like this, it’s sitting by politely while people play racial prejudice and xenophobia for laughs and pretending that this is an acceptable part of contemporary debate…”

Video cuts – panel discussion

A Man: “We’re setting up a false dichotomy here between Britishness and Englishness; they’re not, at all…”

David Starkey: “There’s an absolute dichotomy. The two are completely different, there’s a historic English identity which goes way back before the concept of Britain. Also this notion that England or Britain as uniquely a nation of immigrants is preposterous - every European country is a blend, of course it is, but the great, there are two great differences. The first…”

Laurie Penny: “I believe you have a house in America, Mr Starkey?”

DS: “I have a house in America.”

LP: “I was wondering, where are you domiciled for tax purposes?”

DS: “I am domiciled here, and I pay full taxes, and can I just say…” (stands up to face audience) “as you have chosen to be personal and invidious, let me share a little story with you. One of the great things that is essential to Britishness is the sense of public duty, that you do things for nothing with organizations that can’t pay. Ms Penny, who has been advertising these great left-wing virtues, and I, were to due to debate for a very impoverished little society called the Thomas Paine Society, on the virtues of a republic on the one hand and a monarchy on the other. I…”

LP: (inaudible)

DS: “I was prepared to do it for free, she insisted on trying to charge such a large fee that the event had to be cancelled. Now I think that that is as mean and grasping as some runt comedian (audience applause), and I will not be lectured to by a jumped-up public schoolgirl like you; I came from the bottom, and I will not have it.”

(applause, laughter, jeers etc.)

(LP takes podium)

LP: “Excuse me, may I respond to that, I think I deserve a right of reply to that. I personally feel that asking to be paid…”

DS: “Did you or did you not do what I just said?”

LP: “I was going to respond to that, but if you…”

DS: “Why not do it straight away. Did you or did you not claim such a large fee that the event had to be cancelled?”

LP: “No, I didn’t, Mr Starkey.”

DS: “Well then, every member of the committee is lying and you, clearly, as usual, are telling the truth.”

LP: “No, this is not what was said to me. I…”

DS: “I have emails. That wonderful… method of tracking…”

Chairman: “Alright, alright, respond to it Laurie…”

LP: “No, actually I don’t think I’m gonna respond to it, one of the… the event was cancelled partly because they couldn’t find a speaker in time, because they were trying to fly me out and part of the reason that… the cost for that on top of my being asked to be paid for two days work, because I actually don’t earn very much…”

DS: “Pffffffffff!”

Chairman: “They had two pretty good speakers there already…”

DS: “No, she backed out because she wasn’t being paid.”

Chairman: “Anyway, we’re running out of time, but I wanna come back to Britishness vs. Englishness…”

LP: “I’m sorry, excuse me - I really don’t appreciate being stood on stage to be personally attacked and having a finger jabbed in my face.”

Video cuts

Chairman: “Laurie?”

LP: “I think I’d like to say something about Britishness in terms of what’s just gone on here, which I feel we’ve moved on from very quickly, I attempted to make a point, and had a person on this panel shouting and pointing in my face, and in fact the point that Professor Starkey raised, about me dropping out of a panel when we were due to speak together, my main reason for doing so was that I didn’t want something like that to happen. I felt like I was being set up to be attacked, and part of the reason I decided to – this is a difficult thing to say and it’s easier to say to event organizers that you’re going to charge a ridiculous sum of money - and be asked to… well not necessarily ridiculous but… and be asked to go.” (cheers / jeers?)

Chairman: “Alright…”

LP: “On the other hand, excuse me, I haven’t finished my point. My point is that this is what debates like this come down to. There’s a civil way of putting… racial prejudice… there’s also…”

(Someone walks in front of camera and makes a ‘cut’ gesture to Chairman)

Chairman: “OK Laurie, I want a final word from…”

LP: “I also want to say that there’s a violence inherent in this discussion and it comes out very, very easily.”

Audience woman: “You started it, that’s the problem, you called him a racist, you know you did…”

LP: “He is a racist.”

Organizer: “OK ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to call a halt at this point…”

Conference! The Game

It's conference season! That special time of year when scientists jet off to foreign shores, posters in hand, leaving the confines of the lab behind to spend three exciting days talking about... the lab.

Sadly, not everyone is lucky enough to get to go every year. So if you're feeling left out, Neuroskeptic has the answer: Conference!, a revolutionary new simulation that offers you all the best bits of a major academic summit, all from the comfort of the lab bench.

HOW TO PLAY: Print out the board. Each player has a token. Everyone starts at the Airport. Players take it in turns to roll a single six sided die, and move their token forward that many spaces (marked by circles). The player with the highest h index goes first. Follow the red arrows. If you land on a special square space, something special happens - see the text. First player to land on, or pass over, the Airport for the return journey wins.

Science from WOW to FFS

I've mentioned before that I make notes on the scientific papers I read, which I've found really helps me to remember them. Sometimes these are quite extensive, but mostly it's just a one sentence summary of the main idea, along with a brief comment.

Sometimes a very brief one. After doing this for a while, I've arrived at a scale of three letter comments. From awesome to awful:

WOW!
Ooh!
Mmm...
Hmm.
Pff.
Wtf?
FFS

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may find this helps to interpret some of my shorter posts...

The 70,000 Thoughts Per Day Myth?

Following on from a discussion on Twitter, I've been trying to find out the origin of the strange meme that the average person has "70,000 thoughts per day".

That's a lot of thoughts. It's about 3000 per hour or 50 per minute, just under one per second.

A lot of people believe this, according to Google. Even that esteemed neuroscientist and philosopher Dr Deepak Chopra agrees, although - being a rigorous, skeptical scientist, he acknowledged some error in his measurements and said "60,000 to 80,000".

But where does this number come from?

Searching for the source, I discovered that 70k is only one such estimate. Other popular figures include 15k ; 60k ; and "12k to 50k". This last one is the only number that ever seems to come with a citation as to the source: it's attributed to "The National Science Foundation (NSF)".

This claim was made at least as far back as 2003 by a certain Charlie Greer ("Helping Plumbing, HVAC, and Electrical service contractors Sell More at Higher Profits").

But the NSF is a funding organization. Their main job is to hand out US government money to all kinds of different researchers. They don't do research as such, or at least not much, so it seems unlikely that the NSF actually said this. Perhaps they funded the research that did. But whose research? I can't find any specific sources at all.

One suggestion made on Twitter was that it could derive from Daniel Kahneman's idea that the "psychological present" is a window of about 3 seconds - everything else is either past or future.

Kahneman has in fact used NSF funding, although so have most scientists in the USA.

Now Kahneman himself said in a talk recently that there are 600k of these "psychological presents" per month, i.e. 20k per day. If you divide a day into 3 second chunks you get about 29k a day, but I guess if you assume we're asleep for a third of the day that makes 20k.

OK. I'm not sure life is really composed of neat equal chunks like that, and anyway, those are chunks of experience, not "thoughts"; but even if you ignore that, the weird thing is that very few people think we have 20k thoughts per day. 70k is far more common on Google.

Does anyone know where this number comes from?

Psychology vs Astrology

Are personality tests any more accurate than astrology?

A lovely study I just came across examined this question: Science Versus the Stars. The researchers took 52 college students and got them to complete a standard NEO personality questionnaire. They also had to state the date, time and place of their birth.

Three weeks later, the participants were then given two personality summaries - one based on the personality tests, and one on their astrological chart generated with a computer program.

The trick was that everyone also got a pair of bogus summaries, one of each kind. These were simply someone else's results, picked at random from the other 51 volunteers. They weren't told which were the fakes and which were real - they had to work it out, based on which one matched them best.

The results showed that the subjects were no better than guessing when trying to tell which of the two astrology charts was theirs. They were able to pick their own personality scores better than chance, although only 80% of them got it right, and guesswork gets you to 50% - so this is not all that impressive. Psychology beat astrology, but hardly by a landslide.

This study is a modern update of Shawn Carlson's classic 1985 Nature paper, A double-blind test of astrology. In Carlson's experiment, though, people weren't even able to accurately pick out their own personality scores.

When asked to say which of the four reports was the best match overall match to their personality, 55% of the participants picked their own real personality one - but no fewer than 35% preferred one of the astrology charts, and 10% went for someone else's personality scores. Hmm.

The authors say

the present results represent less of an endorsement of psychological measures than a further indictment of astrology.

but I think it's interesting that even under very favorable conditions (only one fake personality test), people were well short of perfect accuracy at spotting their own psychological scores - which they had themselves produced by filling out a questionnaire, just weeks before. Whether that tells us more about the NEO test, the participants' memory, or the fact that all the students at Conneticut College are pretty much the same, I'll leave it for you to judge...

Wyman, A., and Vyse, S. (2008). Science Versus the Stars: A Double-Blind Test of the Validity of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory and Computer-Generated Astrological Natal Charts The Journal of General Psychology, 135 (3), 287-300 DOI: 10.3200/GENP.135.3.287-300

Mystery Joker Parodies Neuroscience

Someone has created a hilarious spoof paper poking fun at neuropsychoanalysis (but all of fMRI takes some hits too): A Triple Dissociation of Neural Systems Supporting ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO.

Featuring gems such as

• Authors "Steven Z. Fisher and Stephen T. Student" with contact details "mother@amaliastate.edu".
• "Twenty-four healthy participants (all 19-year-old white, male undergraduates who sat near each other in an Introductory Psychology course and were raised in upper middle class suburban New
  England neighborhoods) were scanned but 17 were excluded for not following instructions or falling asleep in the scanner."
• "If you’re like us, you’ve probably been thinking that Social Neuroscience, Neuroeconomics, and Developmental Social Cognitive Affective Clinical Neuroscience are just not cutting edge enough
  anymore. Do not despair. This study represents the first of what is likely to be a productive and active new field of Psychoanalytic Neuroscience."

It really is very funny, but it's also deadly accurate in its highlighting serious problems that plague a certain genre of neuroimaging papers. Who made it? The PDF appeared on Dropbox a couple of weeks ago and, while a few people have Tweeted about it, no-one has claimed ownership, yet.

For the record, it wasn't me.