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!

How (Not) To Fix Social Psychology

British psychologist David Shanks has commented on the Diedrik Stapel affair and other recent scandals that have rocked the field of social psychology: Unconscious track to disciplinary train wreck,

Lots of people are chipping in on this debate for the first time at the moment, but peoples' initial reactions often fall prey to misunderstandings that can stand in the way of meaningful reform - misunderstandings that more considered analysis has exposed.

For example, Shanks writes:

[despite claims that] social psychology is no more prone to fraud than any other discipline, but outright fraud is not the major problem: the biggest concern is sloppy research practice, such as running several experiments and only reporting the ones that work.

It's true that fraud is not the major issue, as I and many others have said. But bad practice, such as p-value fishing, is in no way "sloppy" as Shanks says. Running multiple experiments to get a positive results is a sensible and effective strategy for getting positive results; that's why so many people do it. And so long as scientists are required to get such findings to get publications and grants, it will continue.

Behavior is the product of rewards and punishments, as a great psychologist said. We need to change the reinforcement schedule, not berate the rats for pressing the lever.

Earlier, Shanks writes that evidence of unconscious influences on human behaviour - a popular topic in Stapel's work and in social psychology generally -

is easily obtained because it usually rests on null results, namely finding that people's reports about (and hence awareness of) the causes of their behaviour fail to acknowledge the relevant cues. Null results are easily obtained if one's methods are poor.

Thus journals have in recent years published extraordinary reports of unconscious social influences on behaviour, including claims that people are more likely to take a cleansing wipe at the end of an experiment in which they are induced to recall an immoral act [etc]...

...failures to replicate the effects described above have been reported, though often papers reporting such failures are rejected out of hand by the journals that published the initial studies. I await with interest the outcome of efforts to replicate the recent claim that touching a teddy bear makes lonely people more sociable.

Here Shanks first says that null results can easily result from poorly-conducted experiments, and then criticizes journals for not publishing null results that represent failures to replicate prior claims! But null replications are very often rejected because a reviewer says, like Shanks, "This replication was just poorly-conducted, it doesn't count." Shanks (unconsciously no doubt) replicates the problem in his article.

So what to do? Again, it's a systemic problem. So long as we have peer-reviewed scientific journals, and the peer-review takes place after the data are collected, it will be open to reviewers to spike results they don't like - generally although not always null ones. If reviewers had to judge the quality of a study before they knew what it was going to find, as I've suggested, this problem would be solved.

Other people have great ideas for fixing science of their own. The problem is structural, not a failing on the part of individual scientists, and not limited to social psychology.

A Scuffle In The Coma Ward

A couple of months ago, the BBC TV show Panorama covered the work of a team of neurologists (led by Prof. Adrian Owen) who are pioneering the use of fMRI scanning to measure brain activity in coma patients.

The startling claim is that some people who have been considered entirely unconscious for years, are actually able to understand speech and respond to requests - not by body movements, but purely on the level of brain activation.

However, not everyone was impressed. A group of doctors swiftly wrote a critical response, published in the British Medical Journal as fMRI for vegetative and minimally conscious states: A more balanced perspective

The Panorama programme... failed to distinguish clearly between vegetative vs. minimally conscious states, and gave the impression that 20% of patients in a vegetative state show cognitive responses on fMRI.

There are important differences between the two states. Patients in a vegetative state have no discernible awareness of self and no cognitive interaction with their environment. Patients in a minimally conscious state show evidence of interaction through behaviours...

The programme presented two patients said to be in a “vegetative state” who showed evidence of cognitive interaction on assessment using fMRI but the clinical methods used for the original diagnosis were not stated. In both cases, family members clearly reported that the patient made positive but inconsistent behavioural responses to questions... one of these patients was filmed responding to a question from his mother by raising his thumb and the other seemed to turn his head purposefully.

So Panorama stands accused of passing off patients who were really minimally conscious, as being in a vegetative state. To see signs of understanding on brain scans from the latter would be truly amazing because it would be the first evidence that they weren't, well, vegetative.

However if they were 'merely' minimally conscious patients, it's not as interesting, because we already knew they were capable of making responses.

Now the Panorama team - and Professor Owen - have replied in a BMJ piece of their own. Given that they're charged with  misleading journalism and sloppy medicine, they're understandably a bit snarky:

Just by viewing this one hour documentary the authors felt able to discern that both the patients “said to be in a vegetative state” are “probably” minimally conscious... One of these patients, Scott, has had the same neurologist for more than a decade. Professor Young, who appeared in the film, made it clear that Scott had appeared vegetative in every assessment...

The fact that these authors took Scott’s fleeting movement, shown in the programme, to indicate a purposeful (“minimally conscious”) response shows why it is so important that the diagnosis is made in person, by an experienced neurologist, using internationally agreed criteria.

In other words, they were vegetative, and the critics who said otherwise, on the basis of some TV footage, were being silly.

In other words...it's on.

Turner-Stokes L, Kitzinger J, Gill-Thwaites H, Playford ED, Wade D, Allanson J, Pickard J, & Royal College of Physicians' Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness Guidelines Development Group (2012). fMRI for vegetative and minimally conscious states. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 345 PMID: 23190911

Walsh F, Simmonds F, Young GB, & Owen AM (2013). Panorama responds to editorial on fMRI for vegetative and minimally conscious states. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 346 PMID: 23298817

Notorious Paedophile Reads Neuroskeptic

There's been controversy in the UK over an article published in the Guardian that's regarded as being pro-child abuse.

In particular, the newspaper has taken flak for quoting Tom O'Carroll, a self-confessed paedophile and advocate for the right of people to be one. Amongst other things he's written a book about Michael Jackson. At least this week, until the next one comes along, he is Britain's most notorious paedophile.

Now oddly enough, I recently had an encounter with O'Carroll, although I didn't know who he was at the time. Here's the tale...

A few weeks ago, I got an out-of-the-blue email from a Neuroskeptic reader (as happens often), from someone saying he'd tried to leave a comment on this post but it was rejected for being too long.

O'Carroll (for it was he) wanted to know whether I agreed with his reservations about some research on "Cerebral white matter deficiencies in pedophilic men", and specifically on this statement by the paper's author:

One must consider carefully whether the brain differences we detected [i.e. reduced white matter volume in particular areas] cause pedophilia or whether some aspect of being pedophilic caused the brain differences...

Although it is now known that certain brain structures respond to environmental stimulation, such as the motor cortex, there is no evidence that such stimulation causes any changes in the superior fronto-occipital fasciculus or right arcuate fasciculus (the brain regions in which pedophiles and nonpedophiles differ).

Moreover, the brain regions we identified are extremely large, and no previous research has ever found changes in such large regions of the brain. As an analogy, physical exercise will generally stimulate one’s muscle tissue to grow, but one would not grow an extra arm; neurological changes occur only in a very specific manner.

O'Carroll thought that this is a misleading analogy, because the brain could be plastic in ways we don't yet understand. I agreed. We just don't know enough about the brain, yet, to say that the observed white matter changes can't possibly be responses to experiences.

Several recent studies found that experience and learning can change adult human white matter structure. The changes observed were fairly small, but then these studies were fairly short, so they don't define the upper limit of what's possible over time.

These results are not without critics of their own, and I'm on the fence about whether white matter is plastic at all, but my point is, it's an open question. So comparing the idea of white matter plasticity to 'growing an extra arm' is overstatement - and it would be, whether the topic was paedophilia or anything else.

Now, as I said, I hadn't heard of Tom O'Carroll at the time, and I assumed he had a purely academic interest in the matter, as an piece of oversold neuroscience. But now, thanks to the Guardian drama, I realize that...

Britain's most notorious paedophile reads Neuroskeptic.

Hmm.

On that macabre note, I've often wondered whether James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado Batman shooter, ever visited this blog. It's possible: he was a neuroscience undergraduate and later PhD student over the time Neuroskeptic's been going.

There have been 574 visits from Aurora, Colorado, where Holmes was doing his PhD, since 2008. I'll never know whether he was one of them, but the idea that he might have been is pretty creepy.

How Intelligent is IQ?

"If your IQ is somewhere around 60 then you are probably a carrot'', according to a British spokesman for high-IQ club Mensa.

IQ's in the news at the moment thanks to a paper called Fractionating Human Intelligence from Canadian psychologists Adam Hampshire and colleagues. Some say it 'debunks the IQ myth' - but does it?

The study started out with a huge online IQ test...

Behavioral data were collected via the Internet between September and December 2010. The experiment URL was originally advertised in a New Scientist feature, on the Discovery Channel web site, in the Daily Telegraph, and on social networking web sites including Facebook and Twitter.

The test involved 12 different cognitive tasks, based on the usual IQ test kind of things, and they got a huge 45,000 usable responses.

However, the main part of the study used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure brain activity caused by each of the 12 tasks. There were only 16 volunteers in the brain scan study, which is pretty small.

The key finding was that although each of the 12 tasks made a different pattern of brain regions light up, there were two main components of this: one lit up mostly in response to tasks requiring short-term memory, and the other was associated with reasoning and logic: (EDIT: Picture corrected, oops.)

They did various other analyses that confirmed this, and they also found evidence for a third network responsible for language (verbal) skill.

Finally, the killer conclusion was that there was no reason to introduce the imfamous  'g factor' - a number representing general intelligence affecting performance on all tasks. Although there was a 'g factor' statistically, it was explained by the fact that tasks required both the memory and the logic networks (although to different degrees).

g is the most controversial aspect of IQ testing, because if it exists, that means that some people are just smarter than others across the board - not just better at a particular kind of thing. So has this study killed g?

Well, not by itself. There's a huge literature on IQ and g, going back almost 100 years. This stuff is not based on brain imaging, but just on IQ test scores, and it's a complex topic. I don't think one brain study with 16 people can really overturn that, although it does lend weight to the anti-g camp who have been arguing against g for decades.

There's a sense, though, in which it doesn't matter. If all tasks require both memory and reasoning (and all did in this study), then the sum of someone's memory and reasoning ability is in effect a g score, because it will affect performance in all tasks.

If so, it's academic whether this g score is 'really' monolithic or not. Imagine that in order to be good at basketball, you need to be both tall, and agile. In that case you could measure someone's basketball aptitude, even though it's not really one single 'thing'...

Hampshire, A., Highfield, R., Parkin, B., and Owen, A. (2012). Fractionating Human Intelligence Neuron, 76 (6), 1225-1237 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.06.022

Why (And How) To Write Less

I said a couple of times during my recent trip to UPenn that "Most writing is too long". People seemed to nod appreciatively at this, so here's some more on that topic...

Most writing is too long and the most common reason is that it's not written for the reader's benefit. Readers want the important stuff, as clearly as possible, in the shortest possible space. If you remember that and let it guide your writing, you won't go far wrong. The reader's favourite bits are the ones you don't write.

The problem is that it's tempting to write for your own benefit, not the reader's, and this almost always ends up making things too long. This can take many forms:

Some write to help themselves understand the material, such that the end product is a record of their learning process. Others will insert details that the reader doesn't need, because it's a topic the writer's fond of. Other fear making tough decisions about what to include, so they say everything and hope some of it's good: "Write it all and let God sort them out."

This is common because formal education teaches you to write poorly. Specifically, it encourages people to overwrite. Teachers and professors give assignments and they set a minimum word count. This sends the message that where writing's concerned, more is better.

Teachers have their reasons. They want a brain-dump to show that the student's done the homework, pretty much the opposite of good writing. That's fair enough for school, but if you internalize that philosophy, you will end up writing to show off rather than for the reader's benefit.

Once you put the reader's interests first, you'll naturally start to find your own ways to achieve that. Everyone's style is different, but here's a few I've learned:

• If it starts "On that note...", "Also...", or "Furthermore...", you should probably cut it.
• Join Twitter - writing to a 140 character limit is a great form of discipline. Then imagine that every paragraph you write must become a tweet. You may find you can compress that paragraph into one sentence.
• Just as Twitter is good, other artificial constraints are good. Set yourself a word limit; if you're blogging, make it 500 words.
• Unless the article's about you, sentences that include the word "I" or "we" can usually be cut.
• Think of your piece as a nuclear missile: it has a payload, the message you want the reader to grasp, and a rocket motor, the introduction and other stuff you need to ensure it reaches the reader. Every missile needs a motor, but designers try to make the payload as big as possible, given the size of the motor. Identify what your payload is, and what your motor is. Then think, is my motor too big? (It probably is.) In this paragraph the missile analogy is the motor.
• As a rule of thumb, by writing it better, you can cut it down by half.

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.

Ritalin, The Ultimate Crimefighter?

There's been lots of interest in the idea that ADHD meds reduce crime rates.

No doubt that, even as we speak, worried pundits are writing of how this is a worrying Orwellian scenario and yadda yadda. But what's really going on?

The research is from Sweden and published in the New England Journal of Medicine: Medication for Attention Deficit–Hyperactivity Disorder and Criminality. The first thing to note is that the study is not about giving medication in order to prevent crime; it was purely looking at what happened to people given ADHD treatment for their ADHD.

In a nutshell, the authors found that people diagnosed with ADHD were about 10% less likely to be convicted of a crime during periods when they were on medication for the disorder. This was true of both men and women, and the effect was greater for the more serious offences.

It was a huge study with over 25,000 ADHD patients and the data comprise pretty much everyone in Sweden over the relevant period so in that respect it's a very good study - although speaking of Orwellian, these studies are only possible because of the Scandinavian tendency to make national registers of everything.

Now the big criticism here is that it's just a correlation, it doesn't prove that the meds were what prevented crime. It might be that ADHD meds have no effect on crime, but that people are less likely to commit crimes at periods when they have their lives sorted out (when they're 'on the rails'), one marker of which is that they're seeking treatment for their ADHD.

However, the authors found that periods of use of SSRI antidepressants were not associated with changes in conviction rates. This is quite good evidence against the 'on the rails' critique, assuming that being prescribed SSRIs is as much a marker of being on the rails as being prescribed Ritalin is.

So, in my view, this is pretty good work, as good as any observational non-randomized study. However, remember: this is just about treating ADHD. Not drugging criminals to stop crime.

Lichtenstein P, Halldner L, Zetterqvist J, Sjölander A, Serlachius E, Fazel S, Långström N, and Larsson H (2012). Medication for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and criminality. The New England journal of medicine, 367 (21), 2006-14 PMID: 23171097

Am I Attacking Neuroscience?

A New York Times article just out says:

Neuroscience: Under Attack

Under attack by who?

Er... me. And the rest of the usual suspects:

A gaggle of energetic and amusing, mostly anonymous, neuroscience bloggers - including Neurocritic, Neuroskeptic, Neurobonkers and Mind Hacks - now regularly point out the lapses and folly contained in mainstream neuroscientific discourse. 

I had promised not to do any more self-referential posts, but this one wasn't my fault. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how Neuroskeptic's presented in the article, but not entirely.

The headline is sensationalist - I don't see myself as attacking neuroscience and I don't think any of the others do either. We are trying to defend neuroscience against errors and misrepresentations. My ideal is The Sceptical Chymist, where skepticism helped, rather than undermined, chemistry.

But the job of a headline is to be sensationalist so that's OK. Most of the piece is very good. I'm all on board with this:

Meet the "neuro doubters". The neuro doubter may like neuroscience but does not like what he or she considers its bastardization by glib, sometimes ill-informed, popularizers.

Yet I can't quite go along with this:

A number of the neuro doubters are also humanities scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their disciplines, creating phenomena like neuro law, which, in part, uses the evidence of damaged brains as the basis for legal defense of people accused of heinous crimes, or neuroaesthetics, a trendy blend of art history and neuroscience.

Admittedly this wasn't directly aimed at me because I'm not a humanities scholar, but I believe that neuroaesthetics and neurolaw are absolutely valid - in theory.

I'm not defending any particular manifestation of those, and I've criticized quite a few. But in the abstract, I see nothing wrong with neuroscience helping to explain those things. It will be difficult in practice, but it's fine to try.

Brain Wiring - More Mess Than Manhattan?

Earlier this year, Harvard neuroscientist Van J. Wedeen and colleagues published a Science paper saying that brain white matter 'wiring' is organized in a grid-like fashion, with sheets of fibres crossing each other.

As Ed Yong put it, that the brain is full of Manhattan-like grids.

However, they were wrong - and that neat grid structure was purely an artefact of the method they used. So say London-based critics Marco Catani and colleagues in a Technical Comment just published.

Catani et al argue that the analysis Wedeen et al used was unable to distinguish two crossing fibres, unless the angle between them was very large, i.e. close to a right angle. In other words, they only saw right angles - and hence neat parallel sheets - but the other angles were still there.
 
They present some data of their own, showing the distribution of fibre-crossing angles in 10 healthy brains:

This shows no clear peak at 90 degrees as the grid theory proposes. Some fibres do cross at right angles, but only about 12% of them. The rest cross at a wide range of other angles.

Catani et al finish up by saying that we know, from cutting up brains, that it's just not a grid:

Crossing ... fanning, merging, and kissing are other modalities that are frequently observed in postmortem anatomy and not visible with current diffusion methods. Finally, the grid model does not take into account the presence of thalamic fibers, which project radially in all brain regions. This implies that most white matter voxels have multiple populations of fibers... merging at progressively tangential angles to reach the same cortical areas. Current tractography reconstructions are biased toward solving only crossing. This information is well known to anatomists, and there is a serious risk in proposing the grid model as “a means to validate MRI tractography through consistency with grid structure”. 

Ouch!

Wedeen et al respond robustly, however. They defend the accuracy of their technique, holding that it's more sensitive than alternatives, and say that even supposing their method had a bias towards detecting right angles, that wouldn't explain why they saw neat overlapping sheets.

They also point out that some earlier neuroanatomists did spot the kind of abrupt 'corners' and orthogonal tracts predicted by their theory, such as this drawing of a monkey brain:

They conclude:

The thesis that brain pathways adhere to a simple geometric system best accounts for the available evidence—not like London, but Manhattan; not unfathomable, but unlimited.

Marco Catani, Istvan Bodi, and Flavio Dell’Acqua (2012). Comment on “The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways” Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1223425

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?

Publication Bias in Animal Research

Publication bias has historically been thought of mostly in the context of clinical trials. But I have been banging on for the past 4 years about how it's a problem for more 'basic' science as well.

I'm not alone in my concerns as an interesting new paper reveals: Publication Bias in Laboratory Animal Research. The authors surveyed the approximately 3,000 Dutch scientists involved in research on laboratory animals. The response rate was about 20%.

When asked how much animal research ends up being published, university researchers estimated about half, but industrial scientists put it at only about 10% - which, if true, suggests that publication bias in Pharma animal work is extremely serious.

In terms of solutions, the survey considered two ideas which Neuroskeptic readers will be familiar with - public pre-registration of studies:

Mandatory anonymous publication of research protocols of all ethics-approved animal research experiments in a publicly available database

and also open access to all data:

Mandatory anonymous publication of a brief structured form in a publicly available database, that gave main results or explained why an experiment could not be completed

On average the surveyed researchers felt that these measures would aid scientific progress; improve the validity of the literature; and prevent wasteful duplication of effort - but they also worried that it would increase bureaucracy.

Now, bureaucracy is second only to bias on my list of Things I Hate About Science, so I share their concern - but I really think registration wouldn't have to involve any extra paperwork. In many cases, it could be implemented simply by making existing data public.

For instance, grant applications, and requests for ethical approval, already contain detailed a priori protocols in most cases. They could so easily be published (perhaps with certain details removed for confidentiality reasons) and turned into a powerful weapon against publication bias.

Having said that though - it easily could end up being needlessly complicated and obstructive, as so much of the scientific process unfortunately is today. It will all depend on how it's implemented.

This is why I think it's so important that, as scientists, we reform science ourselves, and get it right, rather than leaving it to the bureaucrats, who won't.

Ter Riet G, Korevaar DA, Leenaars M, Sterk PJ, Van Noorden CJ, Bouter LM, Lutter R, Elferink RP, and Hooft L (2012). Publication bias in laboratory animal research: a survey on magnitude, drivers, consequences and potential solutions. PloS one, 7 (9) PMID: 22957028

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

Recommend Me An Agent

I'm looking for a literary agent.

I have an idea for a book, it's non-fiction, about science, for a general audience. It'll cover some  themes I've written about on this blog, although it'll all be new material.

Anyway, if you can recommend any good agents who you think might be interested in this or if you are one and are interested - please let me know. You can email me at neuroskeptic at gmail dot com. I live in the UK, so a London-based agent would be ideal, but I'm open to all suggestions.

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina"

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" is full of bad science about the brain - is an article I wrote for the New Statesman. It's about a new book which is... not very good.

I didn't come up with the title by the way, but I do rather like it.

See also the Neurocritic's take.

How To Lose Twitter Followers

Inspired by David Allen Green's How to lose followers on Twitter, I thought I'd share some tips on what to avoid doing if you want to be big on Twitter.

I don't think there's any simple formula for gaining followers. You just need to write "good" Tweets, where "good" is impossible to define and depends on what kind of thing you write about. However, there are some simple things that are pretty sure to lose you followers.

• Send a Tweet. Every time you Tweet, expect to lose followers. People will unfollow you when they see your Tweets and decide they don't want to hear more, and the more you post, the more likely they are to feel it's too much. Dense "bursts" of Tweets, in particular, may make people decide that you're taking up too much space in their time line. Tweeting is the only way to gain followers, but unless a Tweet actively gains followers, it will lose them.
• Treat Twitter as a social network. It's not. Or rather, it can be, and that's fine if you want to use it that way. But if you care about your follower count, then you're probably not thinking of it as one. Twitter is a microblogging platform, so treat your Tweets like blog posts aimed at your audience, rather than personal "chat" messages. Chat Tweets rarely gain followers... and that means they lose them (see above). It's not an absolute rule, and if you never chat, it will cut you off from important discussions. But chat should not be your default mode.
• Spam. There are various services that make cookie-cutter Tweets on your behalf. Usually they're a round up of your recent Tweets, or a follower count. In general, avoid these. Your followers want to hear from you, not from a robot, and they want to hear your thoughts, not your Twitter stats. They can be useful, but think very careful before using these.
• Be Bilingual. If you speak more than one language, that's awesome. It means you can communicate with more people. But don't try and mix languages on the same account. If half your Tweets are English and half are French, then half your Tweets are essentially just meaningless clutter, for any given follower. Make two accounts, one per language, and you'll get more followers overall.

Love Truth? Wait.

Britain may be hosting the Olympics, but that hasn't stopped us indulging in our own national sport of complaining. Many of the complaints in the past 24 hours or so have been about this chap:

Rileyy_69 attacked a celebrity on Twitter, who called him out on it, rileyy_69 attacked him more, thousands of fans of said celebrity attacked him, he attacked some of them back, then he apologized, but then attacked again, and eventually someone reported him to the police, and he was arrested on Tuesday morning for malicious communications or something.

All very exciting, but so what?

Should we pity this guy, or did it he bring it on himself? Were the thousands who attacked him jumping on the bandwagon, or justifiably outraged? Should he have been arrested, and if not, why? Because the law in question ought to be repealed, or because it's a fine law but was wrongly applied in this case?

Good questions. We don't know enough yet to answer them. We don't know this person, his life story, his mental health situation, etc. Some details have now started to emerge, but generally the early, fragmentary reports in cases like this only add to the confusion.

It's too early to tell. I don't think anyone can dispute this. Unless you i) know Rileyy69 in real life and ii) are an expert in the relevant areas of law and iii) have read all his Tweets, not just the ones that made it into the newspapers, you are probably not in a position to judge.

It's too early to say, but that's never stopped anyone.

Newspapers and blogs are full of definitive, final judgements on these questions. Both those broadly in favor of the arrest of Rileyy_69, and those opposed, are equally premature. If there is a difference, it's that the latter group also include hypocrites, who swiftly took to Twitter to criticize the knee jerk mob mentality of the Twitterati.

One who really cared about Rileyy_69, the law, the media, or whatever else they claimed to, would above all want to establish the facts before commenting. The truth will out; we can but wait, or try to help it along. But we should not try to outrun it.

The truth is slow.

And that's fine. There's rarely, and certainly not in this case, a need to form your opinions within minutes and to nail your theses to the door of the cathedral within a day of the event. Just wait! You'll be in good company; few of the great minds of history measured time in hours.

"Ah", you might say, "but those who attacked Rileyy_69 on Twitter were, themselves, doing what you're criticizing!". They were, actually, but that's what Twitter is for. Tweets are about speed and in its place, that's fine. The human brain responds to stimuli within about 100 milliseconds; you give people the chance to type that response, and they will. To criticize that is to criticize human nature.

No, the problem is not those who use an avowedly instant communication service as intended. It's those who try to export that mode of thought into the ancient and higher medium of prose longer than 140 characters.

For everything there is a time, a time to Tweet and a time to think. Just don't mix them up.

Whole Brain Teaching...?

Oh dear. The Kansas City Star asks: Teachers learn ways to keep students' attention, but are brain claims valid?

Probably not. Unless you're buying a brain scanner or a plush brain, product 'brain claims' are generally just marketing patter. But let's see.

When Chris Biffle called out the word "Class!" Wednesday morning at Walsh University, 450 teachers and administrators yelled back, "Yes!"

"Class class?" he said. "Yes! Yes!" they replied.

"Classity classity," he said.
"Yessity yessity," they chanted back.

Biffle, one of the co-founders of Southern California-based Whole Brain Teaching LLC, is leading a two-day conference about his method. He calls the technique "Class-Yes." Whole Brain Teaching's website says "Class Yes" activates the prefrontal cortex of the brain and "readies students for instruction"...

Whole Brain Teaching reminds me of Brain Gym, a notorious bit of British neuro-nonsense from a few years ago. According to the WBT research page, they have over 50,000 registered teachers and 2 million views of their videos. This also informs us that:

Class-Yes: Our primary attention-getter activates the prefrontal cortex, often called the CEO of the brain... Little if any learning can take place if the prefrontal cortex is not engaged.

while even "mirror neurons" have a role to play:

Mirror: Many brain scientists believe that we learn by mirroring the gestures and activities of others. They have identified mirror neurons scattered throughout the brain that are activated by mimicking the behavior we observe. Our own experience in WBT classroom indicates that when a class mirrors our gestures and, when appropriate, repeats our words, a powerful learning bond is created between students and teachers.

There are lots of problems here, but here's the most fundamental: the theory behind the system seems to be that activating particular parts of students' brains, through a special task, will help them to use that part of their brain when it comes to the actual lesson a few minutes later. But I know of no evidence that bits of the brain "warm up" like that; if anything they're more likely to "wear out" through lack of energy and nutrients although I don't think that's likely either.

If such warm-ups did work, your best bet for activating your primary visual cortex, for example, would be to stare at a rapidly-changing pattern of random colors for a few minutes. That wouldn't improve your vision. It would just give you a headache.

In fact, why not just activate your entire noggin, pharmacologically? Just grab some pentylenetetrazol - a drug that blocks inhibitory signals between brain cells. Snort a few lines of that and if you survive the resulting seizure, go and learn something and see if you're really good at it.

I'm not saying Whole Brain Teaching is useless, I'm not saying anything about the method itself, but the "brain" claims are misleading. Many of the things they recommend are teaching aids and classroom exercises, and no doubt those are helpful. Plus, psychological factors like teacher motivation, student engagement, and a positive atmosphere are vital in learning, and it doesn't matter if you achieve them through neurosciencey gimmicks, they're still going to help... well, except in terms of educating people to spot neurosciencey gimmicks.

But that's teaching. It's nothing to do with the brain.

Why Blogs Fail

I can think of several new neuroscience blogs that started out with some really nice content, but then they disappeared after a few weeks or months. I'm sure the same must be true of other genres. This is a shame.

Thinking back over the early days of Neuroskeptic, my advice to new bloggers is: it gets better. The early days of any blog are psychologically tough because almost inevitably, your first posts are not going to get the recognition they deserve.

That's because people tend to really pour their hearts into early posts - these are the ones that express thoughts you've been mulling over for ages and are finally writing about - and then inevitably, hardly anyone reads them, because it's a new blog and no-one even knows it's there yet. Certainly that was my experience.

Luckily, it doesn't stay that way. Your first posts will flop, at least in relation to your own expectations, but remember that a) it's nothing personal and b) no-one except you cares. Only you can see your traffic stats and whatever, but even if everyone knew them, they wouldn't mind. You need to push on through that stage and once you do, you won't care about it either.

To get past the first stage, you need to "sell" your blog. I think a lot of new bloggers forget this, or think it somehow won't apply to them, which sets them up for disappointment. Of course, good content is essential - no matter how hard you try, you can't sell crap. But great writing alone is not enough. No, not even yours.

Promotion is part of blogging, but once you get into the right mindset, you'll realize that it's not a chore so much as a natural extension of writing. You write something, and then you go and find people who'll be interested in it, and who might have interesting comments about it, and try and get them involved. Or you get involved in conversations about the topics you're interested in.

Sell, don't beg. Outright asking more established people for links, retweets etc. rarely works and it looks bad. Get people interested in it. If that's a chore, then it means you're not really interested in your own stuff, in which case that's a problem.

If you've done this for, say, a year, then I'd say you've given blogging a good shot and you can make an informed decision as to whether or not it's for you. But if you quit after just a couple of months because "I tried blogging and it didn't work out" or "I had a blog but no-one read it" then I'd say you're probably making a mistake. You haven't experienced all of blogging, only the start of it, which is the toughest and least rewarding part. It gets better.

Can You Learn To Be Synaesthetic?

A neat study from Dutch psychologists Olympia Colizoli, Jaap Murre and Romke Rouw claims that it's possible to train people to have something a bit like synaesthesia - which they call Pseudo-Synesthesia through Reading Books with Colored Letters.

Synaesthesia generally comes out of the blue - some people just have it while others don't. Those who do experience it typically report that they've always had it. But could it be learned?

Colizoli et al recruited 17 non-synaesthetes and got them to read books specially printed such that 4 common letters, "a", "e", "s" and "t", were always printed in a certain colour: red, orange, green or blue. The idea was that constant exposure to the coloured letters might trigger grapheme-color synaesthesia, which is a relatively common 'naturally occurring' form of the condition.
 
On average each volunteer read 100,000 words of the polychromatic prose. They also got a special browser plug-in to colour internet text in the same way, however, most people didn't use it.

What happened? The subjects experienced a colour-letter Stroop interference effect consistent with the idea that they'd learned particular colour-letter associations, although on another task there was no effect. But what was it actually like, subjectively? The size of the Stroop effect was correlated with self-reported synaesthetic experience on the question "I am experiencing color when thinking about certain letters".

However, the average answer to this question was only 2.5 on a scale from 1 to 5, which doesn't seem very high, and of course there was no control group, so this is hard to interpret. They don't seem to have quizzed people about the subjective experience in much detail, which is a bit of a shame. Six months later, participants could barely remember the letter-color pairs better than guessing.

So to be honest, it's all a bit inconclusive, but it's a cool idea.

Although you might expect the coloured text arrangement to be annoying, many participants said that they quite enjoyed it once they got used to it. Only 2 out of the 17 gave up before finishing a book, while several volunteered to read additional books. So if you want to try and give yourself synaesthesia, it could be doable.

Colizoli O, Murre JM, and Rouw R (2012). Pseudo-Synesthesia through Reading Books with Colored Letters. PloS one, 7 (6) PMID: 22761905