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.

John Bargh's "Transient and Ephemeral" Blogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is Science?

The other day I was in a discussion about what "science" is. I've written about this before but this debate got me thinking about it again and I thought I'd set out what I think in more detail.

I wasn't sure how best to structure this so I'm going to start with my main claim, followed by a Q and A bit. The Q's are not intended to be straw-men or caricatures, they're questions I've asked myself in the course of thinking about this.

My Claim: "Science" is just the process of looking at the world and thinking about the evidence in an effort to understand it. It's not a special form of knowledge, scientists don't use a special 'scientific method' - scientists just look and think about things. They may use special equipment and techniques, but in essence it's no different to what we all do every day. As such it makes no sense to talk about the 'limits of science' or 'what science can't tell us', unless by that we mean the limits of human knowledge itself, because science just is knowledge.

Q: "But if science were just observation, everyone would be a scientist and it becomes meaningless." - No: for the same reason that not everyone is a poet, even though anyone can write a poem.

Science is observation informed by previous scientific findings i.e. it is expert observation. Anyone can, say, look at the stars but this doesn't make them an astronomer. Astronomy is in essence just looking at the stars and thinking about them - in a broad sense - but to contribute to astronomy, you first need to know the relevant background, which few except astronomers do.

Likewise, anyone can write a poem, but few of us can make a living out of it.

Q: "OK, but still, if science is just observation, then all forms of knowledge are science." - This is a tricky one, but the answer is crucial to understanding my point.

A few hundred years ago, the word "science" in English did indeed just mean "knowledge". However, more recently, it has come to mean a particular subset of knowledge: roughly, it today includes physics + chemistry + biology. Maybe some others.

We lump these three (or more) things together and call the lump "science". But this lump is more or less arbitrary. Physics + chemistry + biology don't share a special essence, which sets them apart from other kinds of knowledge (other 'sciences' in the older sense.)

So I'm not saying that all knowledge is "science" in the modern sense. The modern word "science" only includes a limited portion of knowledge. But I am saying that the rest of knowledge is essentially no different from science, because "science" is just an arbitrary subset of knowledge.

Here's a picture of what I mean:

Or here's an analogy. The color spectrum has infinite different shades. We conventionally divide it up into "red", "orange", "yellow" etc. and that's fine for most purposes. But there is no essential difference between "orange" and "yellow" and no clear dividing line: they are just collections of shades.

Science is a colour of knowledge. It's not a true kind.

Q: "But if the difference between science and knowledge is arbitrary, are you saying that The Scientific Method is the only way to knowledge?" Not at all. I don't think 'The Scientific Method' exists.

This follows from the fact that "science" is an arbitrary lump. Scientists are a diverse bunch and they use many different methods. Theoretical physicists, for example, use methods which are very close to those of mathematicians - who are not 'scientists' by most definitions. Zoologists use others, and you can get by in (most) of zoology without knowing any math at all. And so on.

In fact, there's almost as much difference between branches of "the same science" as there is between sciences. Just like "science", "biology" is a lump of diverse things, although not quite as arbitrary a lump.

Outside science, people use all kinds of methods as well. Historians have their set of methods, economists have others, all tailored to the particular demands of the case. That's exactly how it should be - all knowledge comes from observation and, to observe different things, you need different methods.

There are many different kinds of facts, but a fact is a fact, whether it's a scientific fact, a historical fact, or just an everyday fact. "Shakespear wrote Hamlet" is just as true as "The earth orbits the sun" is just as true as "It's raining" (if it is, in fact, raining.) The facts of history are just as true as the facts of biology.

But there is a grain of truth in the question here: I am saying that observation is the only way to knowledge.

Q: "That's very simplistic. Are you saying that we can only know what we can see and measure?" - No because I'm using "observe" in the broadest sense here, to include things like noticing, sensing, feeling, seeing, hearing, being told that, reading about...

You observe that it's raining: maybe you look out the window, maybe you hear the rain on the roof, maybe someone comes in from outside dripping wet. You observe that you feel hungry. You observe that Obama is president (even if you've never actually seen him) by watching the news. Etc.

"Observe" is in many cases an awkward word and I'm not saying we should use it in all those cases. My point is that these are all ways of finding stuff out about the world. In that broad sense, I think all knowledge comes from observation - although maybe indirectly, through thinking about observations; thoughtless observation is almost as unhelpful as purely abstract speculation.

Of course, it's easier said than done: very often it's not clear what we've observed (is it real or some kind of trick, mistake, illusion?), what it means, whether it matters, or even what the question is. This is why there's always room for debate, controversy and doubt, at least at first, before all the observations have been made.

Q: "But what you're saying is merely trite and obvious: 'science is based on observation' 'there is no one single scientific method', well, duh!" - From a certain perspective, they are obvious, but if you think so, then you ought to agree with everything else I've written here. They're all connected, you can't take some and leave the rest.

Social Science and Language, Again

On Sunday I asked, Why Don't Social Scientists Want To Be Read? I accused much of social science of using unnecessarily complex jargon.

This post prompted many excellent comments - including responses on other blogs e.g. Andy Balmer and Graham Davey.

The most common argument against my post was, in essence: Every science has a specialized, technical vocabulary. You wouldn't criticize a neuroscience abstract for being inaccessible to a layperson, so it's unfair to expect that from sociology.

This is a good and convincing point. Yet I think that, on closer inspection, it relies on some rather major assumptions.

The natural sciences do have a 'specialized' vocabulary, but only because they deal with things that are of special interest. What is 'special' or 'technical' about the word forebrain (to borrow an example from Andy Balmer) is merely that only neuroscientists are interested in the object, forebrains. It's not part of the everyday English language, because it's not part of everyday life.

There's nothing inherently 'academic' about forebrain, in other words. Plenty of similar terms like 'forearm' and 'foreskin' are part of everyday English, not because they're somehow less precise or less formal, but just because they crop up more often.

Everyday English is inadequate for natural science because scientists study things outside everyday experience. But the major object of the social sciences is everyday human life. Social scientists are interested in things that everyone is interested in - why people think, feel and behave the way they do.

So if the social sciences have need of a technical vocabulary, in the same way as the natural sciences, this would imply is that our everyday language is fundamentally inadequate to understanding the everyday world - in other words, that it is just inadequate, period.

Everyday English has developed to allow people to talk to one another. And the main thing people talk about, is one another, i.e. about society. Like any other branch of science, the social sciences need a rich vocabulary to describe all of the things they study: but don't they already have one - English?

Maybe not. It may be that ordinary English can't express the truth about society. But if you take that seriously, that's a pretty radical claim, akin to saying that the great majority of people are in the dark about how the world works. It's much more radical than saying that chemistry or neuroscience needs special words.

To be clear, I'm not making the populist argument that "Social science is all rubbish - the average man in the street knows better than these eggheads!" The average person is wrong about all kinds of important things, but I suspect that they're sometimes in the right ballpark, as it were, and that their errors are not a matter of lacking the proper words.

Why Don't Social Scientists Want To Be Read?

Here's the abstract of a paper just out called In pursuit of leanness: The management of appearance, affect and masculinities within a men's weight loss forum.

In a somatic society which promotes visible, idealized forms of embodiment, men are increasingly being interpellated [sic] as image-conscious body-subjects. Some research suggests that men negotiate appearance issues in complex and varied ways, partly because image concerns are conventionally feminized. However, little research has considered how overweight men construct body projects in the context of weight loss, or how men talk to each other about weight management efforts. Since sources of information and support for overweight men are now provided online, including dedicated weight loss discussion forums, our analysis focuses on one such forum, linked to a popular male-targeted magazine. We conducted a thematic analysis of selected extracts from seven threads on the forum. Our analysis suggests a widespread focus on appearance, as well as the use of emotion categories when describing difficult bodily experiences. Invariably, however, such talk was carefully constructed and constrained by hegemonic masculinities founded on discipline, work-orientation, pragmatism and self-reliance. The findings are discussed in relation to magazine masculinities and aesthetics, as well as literature on male embodiment.

Phew. Now I think it's fair to say that this is a typical example of what might be called the "social sciences style" of writing. That's why I've chosen to blog about it; nothing I'm going to say is a criticism of this paper as such, but rather of the whole genre.

Why do social scientists write like this?

This paper is about a really interesting topic - the mixed messages men get about what it means to be "a man" or "manly" in today's society. Very topical, not at all 'niche', and important in lots of ways. So why is it written in a way which makes it impenetrable to all except specialists?

I don't think it has to be that way. I've rewritten this abstract, and I've tried to say the same thing without the jargon:

Modern men face a dilemma: society tells them that they ought to have an attractive body, but they are also warned that being concerned about beauty and body image is a feminine trait. However, little research has considered how overweight men think and talk about weight loss. Online weight loss forums offer a window onto such issues, so we analyzed seven threads from one such site, linked to a popular men's magazine. We found that while men took part in (often emotional) discussions of their own appearances and bodies, they always framed such talk strictly within conventionally "masculine" terms such as discipline, work-orientation, pragmatism and self-reliance. We discuss this, in the context of men's magazines treatment of masculinity and male beauty, and relate this to previous work.

Whether I've succeeded, I'll leave others to judge, but I think I have and there's no trick to it - I just read the original, tried to understand it, and wrote down my thoughts.

I'm not saying that the original abstract was "badly written". I suspect it was quite expertly written but that the purpose of writing it was less to communicate ideas clearly, than to satisfy some set of criteria of what 'serious social science' should be like.

If I'm right - isn't that a shame? The ideas here deserve a wide audience, so why aren't they aimed at one?

Bennett E, and Gough B (2012). In pursuit of leanness : The management of appearance, affect and masculinities within a men's weight loss forum. Health (London, England : 1997) PMID: 22815334

You Are Not "Your Brain"

Best-selling mysterymonger Deepak Chopra announces Good News: You Are Not Your Brain.

We are not our brains. We are "conscious agents"... It's very good news that you are not your brain, because when your mind finds its true power, the result is healing, inspiration, insight, self-awareness, discovery, curiosity, and quantum leaps in personal growth. The brain is totally incapable of such things. After all, if it is a hard-wired machine, there is no room for sudden leaps and renewed inspiration...

Chopra is saying that you are a conscious agent, with the power of self-awareness and curiosity etc. Which is true. He then says that "The brain is totally incapable of such things", but you are, therefore, you are not your brain.

The problem is that Chopra has a concept of "the brain" which is essentially a passive, "hard-wired machine". He's right that we are not such a machine; his mistake is to call that machine "the brain", because brains aren't like that either.

But this is not a mistake unique to Chopra. As I wrote previously, the concept of "the brain" is inherently misleading -

What do we mean when we talk about "the brain"? Easy, right? It's this (picture of a human  brain). But this is not an image of a brain. It's an image of a dead brain. In a living brain, all kinds of interesting things are happening. Things we literally can't begin to imagine. Because these are hard to visualize, they can't enter the mental picture.

To picture the living brain as just a yellowy lump is like picturing Wikipedia as a disc. It's accurate as far as it goes, but it misses the whole point. You could download Wikipedia onto a BluRay disc, and then you could describe that disc as "Wikipedia" and you wouldn't be wrong, but Wikipedia is much more than a silver circle.

"The brain" brings to mind an inert squishy lump of a certain size and color. This mental image corresponds perfectly well to a dead brain - which is all the proof needed, I think, that it fails to capture the essence of a living one.

"The brain", in other words, is a mere simplified caricature of the brain.

So when Chopra says "You are not your brain", he is right, in the sense that you are not what Chopra (or anyone else) understands by "your brain", but that doesn't mean you're not your brain.

This mistake also crops up in more serious discussions. There are philosophical arguments that go something like this: the human mind can do things that it is inconceivable for a brain to do. Therefore, the mind is not the brain. But couldn't it be that it is the brain, itself, which is inconceivable?

Broken Hearts and Broken Livers

In a new paper, Beyond the Blues, German psychologists Postert et al discuss how the Hmong people of South East Asia talk about sadness - or rather, how they don't, because they don't really have a word for it.

Based on anthropological fieldwork in a number of Hmong communities in Laos, the focus of this article is on the Hmong term tu siab, literally "broken liver". This is usually translated as "sadness" in the dictionaries, but the authors say that, although it is certainly the closest thing the Hmong have to a word meaning sadness, it is not the same because:

The instance of becoming ‘sad’ in Western contexts is that ‘something bad happened’... This may involve disappointment in personal relationships, but also other afflictions beyond the social realm. At the core of the emotional experience of ‘sadness’ are basic violations of values deeply embedded in Western conceptions of the individual. The afflicted individual feels resigned, passive, out of control...

In Hmong language, the concept of ‘broken liver’ has a strong emphasis on kin relations. It pertains very often to social situations of isolation and neglect from one’s kin including consanguines, patrilineal ancestors, or affines or their unmarried daughters in cases of romantic love. Persons with a ‘broken liver’ may have been voluntarily offended, excluded, or separated from these persons by bad fortune...

One of the highest Hmong values, a person’s vital social integration, is at stake here. However, a state of ‘broken liver’ is usually far from resignation. Contrary to the assumed passivity of a ‘sad’ individual, a ‘broken liver’ is an affective marker highly mobilising social relations and interdependencies ... having a member in one’s group whose liver is ‘broken’ appeals to the collective commitment of all relatives...

[like the English "guilt" and "shame", but unlike "sadness"] ‘broken liver’ demonstrates characteristics of a socio-moral emotion in everyday pragmatics of Laotian Hmong villages. It is typically evoked in a – conscious or unconscious – transgression of an important sociocultural rule. When a man is assumed not to accord to basic principles of social reciprocity by keeping substantial gains from an opium sale for himself, close relatives may develop signs of a ‘broken liver’ signalling their disapproval...

In short, the argument is that the Hmong "broken liver" differs from our "sadness" in being an active response rather than a passive reaction, a social statement rather than an individual feeling, in having a moral dimension, and so on.

But isn't that much like our "broken heart"?

"Breaking someone's heart" is a moral issue. It's not good to be a heartbreaker. If someone broke your friend's heart, you'd be angry. It's a specifically social emotion in the sense that it generally results from betrayal, abandonment, or disrepect. It's true that while the Hmong's "liverbreak" seems to extend to all close relationships, "heartbreak" often has a romantic connotation; but we do talk about "breaking your mother's or father's heart", so even that's not an absolute rule.

Consider this recently broken heart. Doesn't Tulisa's heartbreak fit the tu siab bill?

If so, then the main difference between Hmong and English terminology is that they only have a concept of 'heartbreak', and lack a general concept of 'sadness'. That's quite interesting, but I'm not sure how much to read into it. English doesn't have a word for 'déjà vu'; we had to borrow it from the French, but surely that doesn't mean that no English people ever felt it until the French explained it to them.

I'm no expert but judging by this paper, Hmong emotion terminology is really very similar to ours. The big difference is that the Hmong (in common with other East Asian cultures) link emotions to the liver, which to Westerners sounds silly, but it's no more silly than our talk about emotions being in the heart. They're both just metaphors.

Replace "liver" with "heart", and the following Hmong terms (listed in the paper) look very familar -

• zoo siab  ‘pleased, happy’ (lit. ‘good liver’)
• siab npau  ‘angry’ (lit. ‘liver boiling’)
• chob siab  ‘inwardly offended’ (lit. ‘pierced liver’) etc.

Don't those all make sense? We talk about being "hearty" or "heartened", "taking heart" or having our "hearts lifted" when we're happy or confident; our "blood boils" when we're angry; we talk about feeling "cut", "stung", "pierced" by criticism or insults, and we suffer "heart-rending" traumas.

This is certainly a very interesting paper, but it didn't leave me feeling that the Hmong's emotional life is all that different to ours.

Postert, C., Dannlowski, U., Müller, J., and Konrad, C. (2012). Beyond the Blues: Towards a Cross-Cultural Phenomenology of Depressed Mood Psychopathology, 45 (3), 185-192 DOI: 10.1159/000330944

Free Will: A Dangerous Idea?

The British Journal of Social Psychology has published a fiery rebuke to psychologists who argue that belief in free will makes people more ethical.

Recent much-publicized studies have claimed that scepticism about free will makes people behave less morally. "Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness" as the title of one of hese papers puts it.

In his article (free pdf), British 'independent researcher' James B. Miles says that these experiments are flawed, because they didn't distinguish between determinism (lack of free choice) and fatalism (lack of the ability to change events).

More fundamentally, though, Miles says that free will is used to justify things, such as punishment and poverty, that would otherwise be seen as scandalous -

Western law recognizes that the penal system is so harmful to the existing life and future opportunities of persons that to convict requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet libertarians provide no objective evidence whatsoever for the existence of free will, and therefore no apparent justification for the mass poverty and brutal punishments that belief in libertarian free will often brings with it. The leading legal theorist Stephen J. Morse freely admits that harsh prison conditions and execution are only morally tolerable where the presumption of free choice exists...

...In June 2009, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published research showing that up to 83% of Britons think that ‘virtually everyone’ remains in poverty in Britain not as the result of social
misfortune or biological handicap but through choice (Bamfield & Horton, 2009, p. 23; 69% of those surveyed agreed with the statement and an additional 14% were unsure but did not disagree.) Because of their belief in the fairness of ‘deserved inequalities’, such respondents were discovered to have become almost completely unconcerned with the idea of promoting greater equality while at the same time asserting that Britain was a beacon of fairness that offered opportunities for all...

...Free will may just be the primary excuse many use to legitimize a contempt for the poor that would exist independent of their professed belief in free will, but free will assertion nonetheless provides the ethical fig leaf for such contempt that would be far harder to rationalize (and therefore tolerate) without the myth of free will.

This is a polemical piece (remarkably so, for an academic journal), and clearly this is only one side of the story, but it's hard to deny that he has a point: there's a dark side to the belief in free will. If you doubt free will, and yet praise the myth of it, as some scientists seem to be doing, you need to accept that you're condemning some people (prisoners, most obviously) to suffer as a result "through no fault of their own".

Personally, I think the great majority of people do believe in free will and always will - the arguments against it have been around for millenia, they're as convincing as they'll ever be, and they haven't convinced most people, however irrational that might make most people. So I think the debate over belief in free will is academic; it's not going away.

 Miles JB (2011). 'Irresponsible and a Disservice': The integrity of social psychology turns on the free will dilemma. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 22074173

The Wriggling Brain

What do we mean when we talk about "the brain"?

Easy, right? It's this:

Certainly, this is the image that comes to my mind.

But this is not an image of a brain. It's an image of a dead brain.

In a living brain, all kinds of interesting things are happening. Things we literally can't begin to imagine. Because these are hard to visualize, they can't enter the mental picture.

To picture the living brain as just a yellowy lump is like picturing Wikipedia as a disc. It's accurate as far as it goes, but it misses the whole point. You could download Wikipedia onto a BluRay disc, and then you could describe that disc as "Wikipedia" and you wouldn't be wrong, but Wikipedia is much more than a silver circle.

It doesn't help much that we know that there's more to the living brain than a yellowy lump. Yes, most of us know that the living brain is somehow responsible for thought, feeling, perception, and consciousness.

But we have no idea of how it does so, we don't have any feel for this relationship. We agree with the idea that brain = mind, but that's just an abstract equation. Just as most of us know that e=mc2, but only physicists understand it.

All this leads to philosophical problems. Wittgenstein wrote:

Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. - One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number! - And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here.

What he meant is that we only feel that we can ascribe pain (or any "internal" mental state or event) to something which is behaving "externally".

Now in most cases, that's fine. Most inanimate objects really don't have mental states. But brains do. The brain, we feel, is inanimate; it's just a yellowy lump. By itself the brain is like Wittgenstein's stone - it seems.

So, we feel, the brain itself can't really have mental states, only walking, talking, behaving people can, like wriggling flies. Except we know on an abstract level that brains do have mental states; so we tie ourselves into philosophical knots about "brains" and "persons", asking whether a person is more or less or the same as a brain, and so on.

The whole problem could be removed, I think, if instead of a yellowy lump, we could picture the living brain in all its active complexity; if we could talk about "the brain", not as an inanimate object, but as the most animate thing in the world.

In the brain there are hundreds of billions of cells, and each one is a hive of movement - not visible to the naked eye or even to a microscope, but the movement of ions and neurotransmitters and ultimately information.

I think many philosophical puzzles would lose their edge if we could somehow get a feel for all that; if we could replace the accurate, but misleading, yellowy lump picture of "the brain" with one that captures the complexity and dynamism of the thing: a city, a hive of insects, a vast machine.

The Hidden Face Within

One of these two images contains a hidden picture of a face. Which one?

This was the question faced by participants in a remarkable psychology experiment just published, Measuring Internal Representations from Behavioral and Brain Data.

Five healthy volunteers were presented with a series of random black and white grid patterns. Each grid square was either black or white, and this was randomly determined on each trial.

There was no pattern to the images, they were completely random. But the subjects were told that half of the patterns contained a hidden face, and that their job was to work out which ones did. Each subject saw over 10,000 random images and they took about 1 second to judge each one.


The volunteers "detected" a face in 44% of the images. Somehow, all five of them convinced themselves that they were seeing faces in many of the grids. The authors say that

Upon completion of the experiment we debriefed observers, and all expressed shock that no face was ever presented.

That's strange enough in itself, but here's the really clever bit. The authors compared the patterns which were declared to contain a face, to the ones that were reported as empty. The image below shows the average "face" grid, minus the average "non face" grid, for each individual subject:

As you can see, this reveals...a face! Kind of. The top half shows the raw average; the bottom half shows the statistically significant differences from random noise.

In Subjects 1 and 2, the face is pretty clear, with eyes, a nose and a mouth. For 3 and 4, it's less coherent, but you might be able to see it if you look hard enough. For Subject 5, not really.

What this means is that people (at least, most of them) were not just seeing faces in any noise. They tended to see faces when the random patterns happened to resemble a kind of primitive face, but it was a different face for each person. The authors say that these strange faces correspond to the individual's internal representations, or models, of "a face", that each subject was "seeing" in the noise.

Finally, the whole experiment was conducted while EEG data was being recorded from the participant's brains. The EEG results revealed that there was a clear difference in the neural activity associated with "face" compared to "nonface" stimuli - except in Subject 5, who you'll remember had the least coherent "internal face".

What's exciting about this approach is that it investigates perception in a purely "top down" way. Normally, when we look at anything, what we end up perceiving is a product of "bottom up" influences - the raw data - and "top down" ones - what we expect to see. In this experiment, there was no real "bottom up" data; it was all "top down".

This is a form of pareidolia - perceiving familiar things in random stimuli. Seeing the face of Jesus in your sock, that kind of thing. It works for sounds too: in the famous White Christmas Experiment, people report "hearing" music in pure white noise - when told to expect it. Real-life examples of this include the "Islam Is The Light" doll, and my personal favorite, the singing paedophile Christmas mouse.

Finally, I wonder what embodied cognition theorists make of this paper. Because this paper claims to be "Measuring Internal Representations from Behavioral and Brain Data"; embodied cognition (at least the radical kind) is the theory that "internal representations" either don't exist, or at least don't explain anything about human cognition.

Smith, M., Gosselin, F., and Schyns, P. (2012). Measuring Internal Representations from Behavioral and Brain Data Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.061

Neuroskeptic In The Papers

Two more academic papers have appeared that refer to this blog:

The Openness of Illusions is a philosophy piece about the epistemological implications of optical illusions. It cites my post about a paper dealing with the spooky Hollow Face Illusion. Long-time readers will remember this, but most of you probably won't, so here it is again; it truly is weird:

In my view, an even better demonstration of the same effect is the incredible magic dragon:

You can make your own dragon by printing it out from this helpful page. It takes like 5 minutes to make and it'll provide hours of philosophical fun.

Meanwhile, Stereotypes and stereotyping: What's the brain got to do with it? takes a neuro-skeptical look at the psychology and neuroscience of prejudice. It flatters me with a mention:

It should go without saying that activity in the brain does not indicate in any way whether a mental act is hard-wired (Beck, 2010). It is equally absurd to argue that the amygdala is on anyone’s team or feels occasionally upset. Alas, non-experts should not be expected to spot such fundamental flaws in reasoning without help.

Thus scientists using neuroscientific methods to study phenomena of social relevance are not only expected to be particularly critical towards over-interpreting their own findings, but also to monitor the ways in which their and other researchers’ data are reported in the media. Courageous attempts to counter overblown neuroscience-based claims in non-scientific outlets have so far resulted in numerous critical blogs (e.g., http://www.talkingbrains.org; http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com) as well as in the publication of counterstatements in popular magazines (e.g., Aron et al., 2007).

Do You Have Free Will?

I mean you, specifically.

I'm not asking whether people have free will. I think they do - except you. You're the one person on earth who doesn't have it.

If you disagree - how would you convince me that you do have it?

Alternatively, if you're one of the people who doesn't believe in free will - I agree with you, people don't have it... except me. I'm special.

-

This might seem like one of those thought experiments that only philosophers could care about, but it's of more everyday importance than the general question of 'whether we have free will'. That's an interesting debate, but really it doesn't change anything. If we have it, we always have, and if we don't, we never will. Either way, here we are, and we'd better get on with our lives.

On the other hand, the question of whether an individual has free will has real consequences. It can even be a matter of life or death. It comes up in court cases. Lawyers and psychiatrists don't use the words "free will", they'll talk about responsibility or capacity or sound minds, but what they mean, in essence, is what the rest of us mean by the term free will.

In some of these cases, free will is what you want - if, say, psychiatrists want to confine you to a hospital, and you say you don't want to be there. Other times it's the reverse - if you've committed a crime, and your defense is that some kind of mental or neurological illness made you do it, then you're arguing that you don't have it (or didn't, at the crucial moment.)

But while lots of people have opinions on the abstract "Free Will" question, I don't think many people pay attention to the issue of their own free will or lack of it - until they end up in court. We just assume that if everyone else has it, so do we, and vice versa.

Yet how can we be so sure? Everyone accepts that people differ in regards to how much free will they have. Wwhen people say "I believe people have free will", they don't really mean all people - they surely make an exception for babies, people in a coma, people having a seizure, and probably children, people with dementia, people with severe mental illness... Likewise, people who don't believe in free will recognize that there's a difference between a normal adult and one of those people.

But where do we draw the line, and how do you know which side you're on? This seems to me the most important questions to be asking about free will.

An Objective Measure of Consciousness...?

Could a puff of air in the eye offer a way to evaluate whether someone is conscious or not?

Yes it could, say Cambridge's Tristan Bekinschtein and colleagues in a new paper about Sea slugs, subliminal pictures, and vegetative state patients.

It's all about classical conditioning of the kind made famous by Pavlov. This is learning caused by the pairing of two stimuli, one of them somehow meaningful (usually unpleasant). So if I were to ring a little bell before, say, pepper spraying you, and I did that repeatedly, you would probably close your eyes whenever I rang that bell. Or just punch me, but you see the point.

Anyway, the key is that there are two kinds of classical conditioning. In the unhelpfully named "delay" conditioning, the warning stimulus overlaps with the painful one. Like if I started ringing my bell, then kept ringing it while I sprayed you with my other hand. In other words, there is no delay between the two stimuli... I said it was badly named.

By contrast in "trace", conditioning there is a delay - the warning stops shortly before the second stimulus. Bekinschtein et al argue that trace conditioning requires conciousness. While delay conditioning can occur without awareness of the link between the two stimuli, only conscious awareness can bridge the time gap in trace conditioning.

In trace experiments (in which rather than pepper spray, the unpleasant stimulus is just a puff of air in the eye), people who, when asked, can't explain the relationship ("sound means puff") don't learn to blink when they hear the sound. But with delay conditioning, this "unconscious" conditioning can occur. Likewise, under anaesthesia, trace conditioning is lost.

At first glance this looks like a piece of psychological trivia, but it could have literally life-or-death consequences. If trace conditioning is a measure of concious awareness then it could be used as a way of working out whether brain-injured people in a "coma" or "vegetative state" are aware or not.

This paper is in fact a follow-up to the author's own 2009 study showing that some people in a vegetative state do show trace conditioning - and the ones who did were more likely to subsequently wake up.

One snag is that the humble sea slug, Aplysia, can undergo trace conditioning, yet it is presumably not conscious, at least not in any recognizable sense.

But Bekinschtein et al say that trace conditioning is a product of convergent evolution. Alplysia can do it and we can do it, but we use different means to the same end. Their argument is that while in Alpysia trace conditioning is known to be dependent on just a handful of individual neurons in the creature's tiny "brain", in humans it requires an intact hippocampus (containing millions of cells). People with hippocampal damage, who suffer amnesia, also can't do trace conditioning.

That's a good point but does that mean such hippocampal patients aren't conscious? That would be weird because, apart from the amnesia, they seem perfectly normal. Presumably they're just not conscious of the relationship between things separated in time...

Also, primitive pathways for conditioning might still exist in humans, able to reactivate under special conditions. They do acknowledge this with a discussion of experiments showing that trace conditioning in the absence of conscious awareness of the relationship can occur but only when the warning stimuli are "scary", like pictures of snakes. They say that with generic, neutral stimuli there is no good evidence of unconscious trace conditioning, but this seems like a fairly fine distinction.


Ultimately, it's a very nice idea but only more studies on "unconscious" patients will tell us whether it's really able to measure consciousness in a useful way.

Bekinschtein TA, Peeters M, Shalom D, and Sigman M (2011). Sea slugs, subliminal pictures, and vegetative state patients: boundaries of consciousness in classical conditioning. Frontiers in psychology, 2 PMID: 22164148

The Limits of (Neuro)science

Will science ever understand the brain?

To start off with, it must be admitted that science has done a pretty good job of explaining pretty much everything else in the universe, so just going on past experience, it probably will.

But some say that, sure, the scientific method is fine for things like chemistry, but not for others. The human brain (or some aspect of it: consciousness, the mind, love, belief, or whatever) is the most popular exception. Science just won't work on it, we're told. It's too complex.

Maybe, but I find this view rather blinkered. It relies on taking our current state of knowledge as an eternal truth.

To see humanity as a mystery surrounded by a world of unmysterious things is a very new idea. It would have seemed bizarre just 300 years ago. Back then, nature was pretty much inscrutable. At best human life was no more mysterious. In many ways, less so. There were no end of philosophical, psychological and religious theories, many of them so plausible that they're still around today.

The notion that humans are complex and hard, while nature is easy, is an illusion created (ironically) by the successes of reductionist science. Some of the biggest questions facing mankind for eons have answered so well, that we don't even see them as questions. Why do people get sick? Bacteria and viruses. Why does the sun shine? Nuclear fusion. Easy.

But only easy now. Think of the billions of people who lived and died before say 1800 - they saw the sun every day and they had no idea why it shone, and they knew no-one else did. You may not understand nuclear fusion, but you know that physicists do, you know it's no mystery. 300 years ago, it would have been very tempting to think that no-one would ever know, that the answers were known only by God.

So, to confidently claim that explaining the human mind will just be too hard is presumptuous. It may or may not be, I don't know. Historically, though, the theory that things are inexplicable has a bad track record.

Then there's the idea that humanity is not so much hard, as different. Philosophers have spent many pages coming up with new ways of phrasing that point. Nature is material, but we're spiritual. Nature is in-itself, but we're for-itself. And so on. If we can understand the mind at all, it certainly won't be through reductionistic, mechanistic, rationalist, objectivist (phew) science, they say.

Again, this seems perfectly plausible... to us, now. But people used to say the same thing about living things in general. That was vitalism, the idea that physics and chemistry were fine for inert matter, but anything alive was radically different.

At a certain point in history, when biology was almost completely seperate from (and primitive compared to) the other sciences, that seemed fine. But it turned out to be wrong. With the benefit of hindsight. Nowadays, no-one sees a radically difference between nature and bacteria, plants or animals... well, except humans.

Maybe the mind will never be understood within the framework of the rest of science. I don't know, but I don't think anyone else does right now, either.

Mountains of Mental Disorders

This is a story about a man who lived in a house. Here it is:

The house was a lovely thatched cabin, situated in a wooded valley between two little hills, set against the spectacular scenary of a snow-capped mountain. He'd been born there, and he'd lived there all his life.

One day, there was a knock on the man's door. He opened it to find two official-looking people carrying clipboards, with serious expressions on their faces.

"Hello, sir. We are officials from the Ministry of Mountains. Sorry it took us so long."
"Oh... excuse me?", the man replied, puzzled.
"We're very sorry we didn't get here earlier."
"I'm afraid that I don't know what you mean. I wasn't expecting any..."
"Hmm. Let me explain. The Ministry of Mountains exists to help people who live on mountains. So, you see, we're here to..."
"Ask for directions to the mountain? It's about 10 miles down the road. Just look up - you can't miss it."

The official looked unamused.
"No. We're here to help you, sir."
"Help you to cope with the rigors of mountain living!" the other chimed in, helpfully.
"But... I don't live on a mountain."
"I'm afraid you do. Look - " and the first official unfolded a large map. "Do you agree that there is a mountain, here?" and she pointed to a spot 10 miles down the road.
"Yes. Actually I just told you about i..."
"...and, do you agree that you live - here?"
"Of course, but..."

"So you do live on the mountain. The very ground beneath our feet right now is part of that mountain nearby."
"No it's not." The man protested. "This is a valley, miles away. I mean just look outside. We're clearly not on a mountain now, are we?"
"How old fashioned. That's what we used to think. But, thanks to advances in geology, we now appreciate that these hills and valleys are merely a part of the mountain."
"Yes!" the other said, whipping out a textbook and becoming increasingly enthusiastic. "You see, a mountain is merely a mass of rock, and this rock extends underground for a considerable distance... It's impossible, really, to draw a line on the map and say categorically, this side is mountain, this isn't. So 'mountains' are an arbitrary construct. 'Hills' are likewise just protrusions of the underlying mountain and..."

The man was even more confused now. "Umm... well, I suppose, technically...but..."
"...so yes, so you do live on a mountain. And we know that this is very difficult. You're exposed to all kinds of dangers like blizzards, altitude sickness, avalanches..."
"Not really. It's nice here. It doesn't even snow most years."
"That's unlikely. You agree that mountains have blizzards and avalanches? Right. And you earlier agreed that there's no dividing line between you and a mountain. So logically..."
"Er..."
"So you are in danger! Don't worry, though. We're here to help. To start off with, we're going to reinforce your house with six tons of cement, to protect you against rockfalls. The construction crew will arrive tomorrow morning. Now, as for those blizzards..."
The man had had enough of this.
"This is absurd. Now look - there is a guy who really does live on top of the mountain in a rickety old shack. Old Grandpa McHermit. He might actually need your help. I don't. Get out! And if I see anyone with a bag of cement tomorrow morning, I'll shove it right up their..."

---

As you may have guess, this story is a metaphor. There is a movement in psychiatry at the moment, away from a 'categorical' view of mental illness towards a 'spectrum' view. Mental disorders are not things you either have or don't - defined according to some arbitrary cut-off. Rather, they're things that everyone has, to some degree.

This has already happened, or is happening, to autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, and more.

Now, the "spectrum" or "dimensional" approach has much to recommend it. It's true that diagnostic cutoffs are arbitrary. It's true that the categorical approach doesn't capture the true degree of variation that real people display.

My worry is that these new "spectra" are, in practice, merely the old categories, just bigger. We still think of people as being ill or not-ill, although we may call it on the spectrum or off it. Worse, we still think of "ill" in the same way as we used to i.e. as referring to the most severe end of the spectrum. The only difference is that we've expanded the old category of "ill" to cover more people.

This is evident in the fact that we still use the old categorical labels. It's the autism (or schizophrenia or bipolar) spectrum, even though "autism", in the old sense of a discrete disorder, is now supposed to be just one extreme of that spectrum. Yet the point about an extreme is that it's unusual, so why call it that?

We don't call the rainbow the red spectrum. We don't call height the midget spectrum. We don't call hills part of the mountain spectrum.

The point is, we really think of color and height and altitude as spectra, not as approximations to an extreme point, and that's good, because they are. Now it might well be possible to think of autistic or bipolar traits in the same way - but not if we call them autistic and bipolar traits. And not if we just rename them, while keeping the mental associations the same.

Not unless we can find a way of referring to what's currently called the autism spectrum without making anyone think of autism when they hear it. Similarly for "bipolar" and all the rest. Until we get to that point, there's a real risk that "spectra" will just be big categories.

Edit: This post has been very kindly translated into Hebrew over at the alhasapa.com blog.

The Ethics of Forgetfulness Drugs

Drugs that could modify or erase memories could soon be possible. We shouldn't rush to judge them unethical, says a Nature opinion piece by Adam Kolber, of the Neuroethics & Law Blog.

The idea of a pill that could make you forget something, or that could modify the emotional charge of a past experience, does seem rather disturbing.

Yet experiments on animals have gone a long to revealing the molecular mechanisms behind the formation and maintanence of memory traces. Much of the early work focussed on dangerously toxic drugs but recently more targeted approaches have appeared.

Kolber argues that we should not shy away from research in this area or brand the whole idea unethical. Rather we should consider the costs and benefits on a case-by-case basis.

The fears about pharmaceutical memory manipulation are overblown. Thoughtful regulation may some day be appropriate but excessive hand-wringing now over the ethics of tampering with memory could stall research into preventing post-traumatic stress in millions of people. Delay could also hinder people who are already debilitated by harrowing memories from being offered the best hope yet of reclaiming their lives.

He says that

Given the close connection between memory and a sense of self, some bioethicists...worry that giving people too much power to alter their life stories could ultimately weaken their sense of identity and make their lives less genuine.

These arguments are not persuasive. Some memories, such as those of rescue workers who clean up scenes of mass destruction, may have no redeeming value. Drugs may speed up the healing process more effectively than counselling, arguably making patients more true to themselves than they would be if a traumatic experience were to dominate their lives.

This is a complex issue. I can see his point, although I'm not sure the rescue worker example is the best one. A rescue worker, at least a professional one, has chosen to do that kind of work. The experiences that are part of that job are ones they decided to have - or at least that they knew were a realistic possibility - and that may be an expression of their identity.

The argument is perhaps more convincing in the case of someone who, quite unexpectedly, suffers an out-of-the-blue trauma. In this case, the trauma has nothing to do with their lives; if it interferes with their ability to function, it might "stop them from being themselves".

Kolber ends by quoting a fascinating story from Time magazine in 2007, which I didn't catch at the time:

Take a scenario recounted by a US doctor in 2007 (ref. 9). The doctor had biopsied a suspected cancer patient and sent a tissue sample to a pathologist while the woman was still in the operating room. Thinking she was completely sedated, the pathologist announced a bleak prognosis over the intercom.

The patient, who had received only local anaesthesia, heard the news and began to shriek, “Oh my God. My kids!” An anaesthesiologist standing by quickly injected her with propofol, a sedative that causes some people to forget what happened a few minutes before they were injected.

When the woman woke up, she had no memory of hearing her prognosis.

Kolber A (2011). Neuroethics: Give memory-altering drugs a chance. Nature, 476 (7360), 275-6 PMID: 21850084

Science Without Method

Everyone knows that The Scientific Method is the key to doing science. No-one's quite sure what it is, but they know it's there, and it's something rather special.


It's not. When scientists sit down to work, we don't use "the scientific method" to make discoveries. We use microscopes, brain scanners, telescopes and particle detectors, all of which are just ways of looking at things. They're special in terms of what they let you look at, but that's it. Science is looking.

It's true that in order to do good science, you need to be careful. You need to avoid falling into various traps that lead to misleading data and false conclusions. You could call the care taken over scientific observations "The Scientific Method", and some people do, but that's misleading, because none of it is specific to science.

One of the most important considerations in science is making make sure that you have a proper control condition. This sounds technical, but all it really means is that you need to make sure that you really are looking at what you set out to observe.

To discover the effect of a drug on people, say, you just give them the drug and look to see what happens, using the appropriaye equipment. However, you need to compare this to an appropriate control, such as a placebo pill, because if you don't, you're not just seeing the effect of the drug, many other things as well, such as the placebo effect, the passage of time, random events.

In the same way, if you wanted to find out what happens when you push that little button on your TV remote, you wouldn't mash five other buttons at the same time. To discover what was in the top drawer of your dresser, you'd look there, not in the bottom drawer.

That's really all there is to it. It can be complicated to do this in practice, but the principle is that simple: you take care to look at what you're interested in.

It's said that part of the "Scientific Method" is forming hypotheses, or theories. Scientists do that, but so do we all, all the time. You might have a theory that your boss is an alcoholic, or that your husband is cheating on you, or that your car's spark plug is bust.

You might call these ideas, notions, hunches, suspicions, thoughts, fears, but they're still hypotheses about the world. Indeed, scientists often use those words too. One word is as good as another.

If your boss was an alcoholic, the way to prove it might be to somehow give him a breathalizer test after lunch, or sneak a peek at his credit card bill and see how much he spends on booze. That would be an observation to test your hypothesis, or in other words, an experiment (another formal word that scientists don't always use).

That's all science is. Looking at things carefully, getting ideas, and checking them out.

I said this in my last post, but it bears repeating: this is why most objections to, or concerns about, "science" or worse "modern science", fail. Any given scientist, or any given scientific theory, may be wrong, just like anyone or anything else. Yet to say that "Science can't" do something is saying that looking and thinking can't do it. To blame "Science" for something is to blame the human mind.

Note: This post is a follow-up to Science Doesn't Say, and the second in a three-part series.

Science Doesn't Say

How many times have you heard someone say that "science tells us" - or that it shows, reveals, says, proves, or makes clear?


It's very common. But it's misleading.

Scientists never talk like this while they're doing science, which suggests that there's something wrong with it. Rather, we say: "Our experiment was inspired by the fact that X, which was shown last year by Y et al".

Y et al aren't just some bunch of famous smart guys who came up with an idea and told everyone, and everyone believed them, because scientists respect authority - which is what "Science Says" means.

No, Y et al is a paper, or other report, and when we say that it shows something, we mean it quite literally. Scientific data is like a photograph or, more accurately perhaps, a window, through which we can just see X.

'Science' is nothing special. It's just looking at stuff.

Indeed, there are scientific papers where the key result is literally a photo, usually taken down a microscope or through a telescope, but still. This paper is a great example. The key result was that the little yellow thing in the third image grew some extra sprouts from day 0 to day 1. It takes some knowledge of the context to understand why that's so interesting, but the actual result is right there.

However, even where the result isn't literally a picture, it is still a window.

This line shows the chemical composition of a particular part of someone's brain. Each of the peaks on the curve corresponds to a particular chemical, and the height of the peak tells us how much of that chemical there is.

There's nothing mysterious about why particular chemicals cause particular peaks. It's well understood. (Conceptually, it's like each molecule is a bell, of a particular size and shape, and they make different sounds when you shake them around. The line is what you get when you shake the piece of brain up, and record how much of each sound you hear back.)

Getting this data is a high tech process requiring special equipment, but all that's just background detail when you actually come to do it. Just as a photographer doesn't need to worry about the mechanics of their camera, and you don't need to worry about how your eye gathers and focusses light as you're reading this.

There is an element of authority and trust in science, but not in any special sense. To take published evidence at face value, you do need to trust that the authors haven't manipulated it, and to trust that they gathered it in the way they described.

But the same goes for any other kind of evidence. Any photograph could be Photoshopped, or the caption could be misleading. Anything you read could be made up. In everyday life, we don't worry about this unless there's a particular reason to.

A scientific journal is just a newspaper with access to better equipment.

There's a view in which "Science" is a kind of oracle that hands down judgements from on high, with scientists as priests who record and proclaim the revelations. This leads to no end of problems.

It easily leads to the view that science is somehow especially hard to understand, or even that we can't understand it, so there's no point in trying. It can lead to the idea that science can't be very interesting compared to the real world. It leads to questions what good it can do, or whether science can ever answer 'the big issues'.

When you realize that science is just looking at stuff, you see that those concerns, far from being valid, don't even make sense.